


Ghost Town

by roseveare



Series: Transformations [2]
Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, Season/Series 03, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:34:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2519312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseveare/pseuds/roseveare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A horror Trouble hits Haven. Duke's undead and Audrey's neck looks far too tempting. Nathan's dead (again) and has his hands full with former residents of Haven who want a piece of him. Audrey's hoping to solve this Trouble before the fake body count turns into a real one, but it's going to be tricky considering her new status as the one viable human victim left in town...</p><p>Attached to (mainly) my Spook Me Halloween fic series, but can be read as a standalone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I'd had this idea long before spoilers even hinted at the show doing it. Dammit.
> 
> Can be considered a sequel to [Comfortably Numb](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1030340), last years Spook_Me fic, but it's not necessary to have read that fic to follow this one.

PART 1

“It isn’t like you don’t spend time with Duke when I’m not around.” Audrey said it and grimaced, because that wasn’t entirely true. Duke and Nathan had spent very little time with each other, lately, when she hadn’t been around. “Or at least not _participating_. This morning, for instance.” She certainly couldn’t deny the benefits of Duke and Nathan being able to occupy themselves with each other when she was tired. But one handy alleviation of particular relationship pressures due to their arrangement was only replaced by other problems peculiar to it. She sighed in frustration. They were _supposed_ to have a Solemn Pact not to talk about things like this at work, yet here they were again, in Nathan’s office, sifting through the day’s paperwork and arguing about three-way sex. 

“I just--” Nathan swung out his long arms, helplessly. “I feel like I miss too much. Working late… Town meetings. I should be with _you_. Now more than ever.” He was adamant that he wasn’t going to let her disappear with the meteor storm, but the argument seemed to be exposing his anxieties. “It’s not about Duke. Not like that. Not really.”

“Which is good, considering that would be pretty hypocritical after what you and he were doing this morning,” Audrey persisted. “Besides, if anyone should complain about… time-share… it’s probably _Duke_. You and I are together all day. Plus, you know?” She swung away, pinning up the bulletins on the board, continuing to talk over her shoulder. “Mostly all we do without you is watch the movies and TV _we_ like and _you_ gripe about.”

“Right. Because after dealing with monsters and aliens and the paranormal all day it’s just what I want to go home and watch for fun,” Nathan griped.

“Yeah, well, point being _that’s_ what we do without you, not an excuse to start _that_ argument up again as well. We’re not waiting to seize the moment to indulge in shenanigans that don’t include you. And even if we did do that, you need to learn to share. Because that _should_ be okay.” It was pretty funny, though, and she and Duke were both agreed on it, that the presence of the guy who couldn’t feel, who was _supposed_ to be the staid type among their trio, was the factor that ruled their collective libido.

Nathan was sticking to his guns and pretending this was about work. “If I hadn’t taken this job… If I hadn’t taken it _back_ after Merrill got killed--”

He didn’t finish the line, and Audrey heard a soft sound like a whisper. She frowned, waiting for him to continue while she sank in the last pin. Then there was a harder sound, behind her -- the _thump_ of a heavy body falling to the floor. 

"Nath--" she began, turning around. When she saw his sprawled out arms and the top of his head just visible on the floor behind his desk, she froze. Then urgency kicked her sharply, and she was at her partner's side in seconds. He was still, too still, and unresponsive when she shook him: gently at first, then more roughly. There was _no_ movement in his body... not breathing, not reflex at her touch -- and even unconscious or asleep, he usually stirred at her touch -- not any of the other small movements even an unconscious body made. His skin felt colder than it ought when she pushed her fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse, even though he'd literally only just collapsed, had been speaking to her seconds ago. She rested her head on his chest, listening for a heartbeat, desperate for any sign of life.

Nothing. There was _nothing_.

Her first thought was that something had happened to Moira. Only last week, Moira had raised Nathan from the dead, and... but no, because her sister, Noelle, had also died (temporarily) and the people previously resurrected by Noelle, including Moira, definitely hadn't all died with her. Was this, then, some other side effect or failure of Moira's Trouble? She had resurrected two people at once, after all...

Audrey saw Nathan's dead body in her nightmares, now. For the last eight days. Was... _was_ she dreaming? Was this just another horrible, vivid dream repeating those awful events?

She didn't bother taking the time to pinch herself before she grabbed for the phone on the desk. Dialled the switchboard and gasped out to Laverne, "Nathan's collapsed! He's not breathing... Get me an ambulance here, _now_!"

She was already moving down again, drawing in air in a deep breath, then pressing her lips over Nathan's, breathing into him. His lips felt unnaturally, impossibly cold. But she couldn't think about that. There were any number of things this _could_ be. Right now, she had to take it at face value, couldn't _risk_ anything else -- focus on Nathan lying collapsed in front of her, and apply CPR for all she was worth. Because even if there were all those other options... later would be _too late_ if this was as simple as what it looked like.

The world vanished into chest compressions and a desperate struggle, her fight to pull Nathan back to life. It seemed no time at all before she'd been working so long that her head spun. Time was deceptive in straits like this, and a nagging feeling told her that something about her sense of timing was wrong. She risked a look up at the clock. Fifteen minutes! It had been almost fifteen minutes, and...

Something else was wrong, because if nobody had come in response to her call by now, then nobody was coming at all. She realised, holding her breath and trying to listen past the straining in her chest and the pounding of her heart, that the police station was silent. There were no voices chattering, and there was no movement of people heading about their business.

She ignored it and put her head down again, heaving in breath she couldn't really afford to give away any longer. Nathan! She must first continue trying to save Nathan. It had been a long time, but she'd been breathing for him, keeping his circulation going, all this time, and it might yet not be too long. She refused to give up.

She was still puffing breath into his slack lips uncounted minutes later where there was an almost accidental _whump_ against the outside of the office door. She was so immersed that all she felt when her head jerked up was frustration at the interruption. _Go away!_ she thought. _Go away, go away, go away!_ She had no time to deal with it. She had to _save Nathan!_

Irrational, she realised, lifting her head from his a moment later and somehow finding the breath to yell, "Help me! Nathan's stopped breathing! I need you to fetch someone -- an ambulance. Please...!"

The fumbling sort of scuffle at the door didn't come across as an urgent response. Again, that _whump_ sounded against the outside, like someone was planting their whole body against it, trying to come in. It wasn't locked. The handle moved slowly, but failed to open, the movement not quite tripping the catch. The closed blinds swayed.

"Damn it, you need to _get someone!"_ Audrey yelled, stumbling to her feet with a backward glance at Nathan's still form. What were they playing at out there? She couldn't keep this up forever. She needed EMTs, equipment, help. She dived for the door and wrenched it open. "What the _hell_ are you--?"

Empty white eyes in a dead face greeted her. It was a uniformed officer... Darren, Dave, she wasn't sure. He was by-the-numbers and the overtime had to be wrung out of him drip by drip. He didn't look like himself, though. His face was twisted, pale and blank, scarred and pitted. He looked like he'd been dead for a week. He looked like a B-movie extra. Audrey drew her breath in sharply but didn't scream. It wasn't especially any determination to avoid damsel in distress clichés. She simply didn't have the breath. She struck out with her hand, clipping him on the jaw, and as he lurched forward, she ducked under his reaching arms and went the only way available -- out, through the gap of the open door.

But no, no, _no!_ Nathan was still inside! Nathan was--

 _Dead_ , and she'd just encountered a zombie. She watched another officer shuffling in slow steps at the end of the corridor and thought, _please, please, let this be a Trouble_. Nathan wasn't dead. He'd been caught in some sort of zombie Trouble. He was probably going to get up and start shuffling around, too, which was annoying because she'd rather fix this with her partner beside her, but it was okay, because _when_ she fixed this, alone, he would be back to normal, and so would the rest of them.

She looked back to Nathan's office. Zombie Darren or Dave was moving around in there, confused, but wasn't paying any attention to Nathan's body. The other cop at the end of the corridor had noticed her, though, and was moving towards her now. She needed to get out. Laverne, she remembered, had never called the ambulance. That would only happen if Laverne _couldn’t_ call the ambulance. If this was the _whole town_ , she couldn't help Nathan by lingering. She'd already exhausted herself trying CPR, and it wasn't working. She had to fix the Trouble. Then he'd be fine. He had to be.

Audrey ran, taking the other corridor and heading toward the back door of the police station. She saw the body of another officer, old Jerry Jackson, three months from retirement and bitching about it every day, sprawled face down with his nicotine-stained fingers outstretched. It wasn't charitable, but the sight increased her hope that what had happened to Nathan was almost certainly part of the same Trouble. What had happened to Nathan was no longer _unique_.

There were noises nearby, but she couldn't see the source: grunting, scuffling... Whipping around, she spun full circle and then dashed for the door. It was in sight now... She was almost there...

A heavy, furry blow hit her, bowling her over, bringing with it the stink of wet dog. Audrey cried out as she felt sharp pain sink deep into her shoulder. Moving only tore her own flesh against its teeth. She struggled anyway, trying to throw off its weight. Dug her fingers backward sharply, searching for weak spots. Found a knee joint, then a hairless groin. Stabbed with her fingertips, bunching them together and bracing them for maximum impact. There were some weaknesses all male animals had. A whimpering squeal resulted and the teeth in her shoulder parted. Audrey squirmed around, trying to ignore the pain. She dragged her gun out and raised it--

She was faced with an honestly bad B-movie werewolf. It still had vaguely human and bipedal features. That, more than anything, was what made her freeze. She didn't know who it might have been, but from what she'd already witnessed, she had a pretty good idea that it was _someone_. Probably a colleague, almost certainly blameless of any harm when this Trouble wasn't in force. She backed off instead of shooting. When it made another move forward, she fired into the floor in front of it, then as it was skittering back, lunged for the door, slammed through it, and shoved it closed behind her. It juddered horribly as the werewolf rammed the other side. She hoped werewolves weren't any better at opening doors than zombies were, and she risked letting go of the handle and ran, gun still poised in her hand.

The world outside seemed darker than it ought, and there was an orange, eerie cast to the sky. The buildings seemed to loom more. There was a trace of a full moon starting to resolve in the sky. 

It was only about 11AM on a Monday morning.

Behind the police station and at the back of the main street, she couldn't see anyone -- or anything -- else. Out of sight of the police station, she dared to slow down, and gulp in desperate, panting breaths. She tried to quiet the rasping of her breaths, to listen out for new threats. Her steps jerked to a halt as she saw some kind of grey-fleshed monster looting in a bin. It raised its head and stared back at her in return, but didn't do anything except bare its teeth warningly, then carry on.

Audrey sidled past it.

She approached and peered around the corner. A few ‘people’ dotted the street, though that might not be the best description for what she saw. A few bodies dotted the street, too. 

_Was_ this the whole town? It wasn't just a zombie Trouble -- she had seen more than those, now. More like a horror movie Trouble. The werewolf had been seriously rubbish. She couldn't explain the people who had just collapsed, but those who'd been turned into monsters didn't seem to care about the bodies of the apparently dead, just moved on by and left them alone. Audrey was relieved to think that Nathan's body, which she had been forced to abandon, was probably safe. 

No. He was only _safe_ if she could resolve this. 

They _had to_ turn back. It would be too much of a horror, otherwise. The body count she'd already seen...

She leaned against the brick wall of one of the buildings adjoining the police station, recovering breath, nerve and resolve. She needed a plan. She had to find out whose Trouble this was, to start with, and that wasn't going to be easy with a whole town to search. She needed her friends, if she could recover them. Nathan didn't seem to be an option, but perhaps Claire, Duke, Dwight, the Teagues... Claire knew a lot of Haven's Troubled, she might know whose could have exploded into this. So might Dwight. The Teagues always had their paper and information network. Duke could help her fight off the horror movie monsters.

Only if they weren't caught up in this already themselves.

First, she needed to get to her car. It wasn't far, but it was in full view of the whole street and she felt very exposed. This was one of those times when her immunity to the Troubles put her in danger -- if these were all horror movie creatures that preyed upon _humans_ , then she might be the only victim left here for them. One small blonde in an entire town full of monsters.

Audrey was never watching horror movies again.

"Okay," she said to herself. "I can do this. Don't run. Don't draw suspicion. Just… walk confidently and steadily..." She walked out into the street, controlling her nerves, telling herself that, sure, there was something she could be taken for that wasn't _human_ , if she just kept control of herself and brazened it out. The zombies moved differently, and she wasn't up to shambling so slowly, lest her nerve break altogether, but there were other people walking around and they looked... kind of normal. Except for a flash of red or yellow eyes, or a warty nose, or...

She walked at a measured pace to her car. Got in. Got her foot on the pedal and pulled out, measured and methodical still...

Audrey drove through the streets of yet another altered Haven. The Christmas Trouble had been bad enough for Audrey’s nightmares. This Trouble was a literal nightmare. As she drove, she could see that people were starting to gather in clusters. Groups of women and a few men dressed in black or other dark colours, with witchy features and paraphernalia, but there seemed to be different types of popular culture witchery represented, from the cartoonish warts and pointy hat to ragged crones, to the type of younger Goth witch popular with teens. Audrey guided the car past a group of men variously stylishly dressed; black was still a popular option. A good looking young man, with slicked back dark hair and pale, perfect features, leaned toward her window and flashed her a smile with fangs in it. Audrey's heart couldn't help but flutter a little bit despite herself. 

Okay, so there were some benefits to crap pop culture vampires.

...Damn it. He was _school age_! She was a terrible woman for even thinking about it.

The _Herald_ office was lit up with an eerie glow. Audrey slowed her car to a crawl and peered through the windows as she passed it. Vince stood in the window, looking out. His big frame had reached even bigger, ogrish proportions, and he had to stoop beneath the ceiling. She couldn't tell if that was recognition or even cognition in his altered face. A little goblin-like Dave jumped up and down next to him, trying to see out. Vince's hand rose incongruously in a big, lumbering wave...

Audrey sidled on, deciding this was _not_ going to be her first stop. So. Duke, then. He was generally much easier to find than either Claire or Dwight, and with Nathan… gone… it was where everything in her was pulling her to go. She drove to the _Grey Gull._

It had a dilapidated, shabby, spooky look in the new Haven. Shadows seemed to cling to the little building on the waterfront, making Audrey blink and pause. She had never thought of it as ominous before.

It was early for Duke to have anything in the way of a clientele, but as Audrey cautiously opened the door, a female zombie stumbled out. Yeeech, that whole problem with door handles again. Audrey backed off from it, internally cursing. If she shot it anywhere but in the head, would it obey the rules of its movie origin and keep going regardless, or would it be crippled by a lesser wound like the living human being underneath the Trouble? She didn't want to risk any shot at all. It was much slower than she was... Perhaps she could lead it away, and then double back...

"Hey." Someone else dived out of the door, grabbing the zombie's arm as it lurched towards her and hauling it back, shoving it off in a different direction. "Go. _Get_. Yes, you. Scoot." A brusque hand gesture accompanied that instruction set. "Freakin' mindless things."

"Duke! Oh my God!" Audrey almost flung her arms around him in relief. He looked... not exactly _normal_ , because like everything else, he somehow looked darker, with more shadows, more contrasts. In Duke, it made him more devilishly handsome. She'd never really seen him wear black before, and it was... interesting in all the right ways. He'd noticed her impulse to hug him, and was holding both arms out to welcome the hug with what was a slightly lascivious smugness, and _that_ was totally Duke in his own giant dork way. But still Audrey hesitated, and asked warily, "Duke? Do you... know me?"

"Now there's a question," he said, mock-morosely. "I thought you had an embrace waiting for your rescuer, there." Ever hopeful, his arms were still up, but as Audrey narrowed her eyes at him, he lowered them.

" _Duke_ ," she said again, with deep suspicion. Everyone she had seen in town was dead or altered. There was no good reason to believe he had escaped. "What _are_ you?"

He smiled at her, opening his mouth slightly, and she saw the little points of his fangs.

It wasn't the _logical_ reaction by any means, but she felt the heavy _thump_ of her heart responding in her chest and her body felt suddenly... hotter. Pop culture had a lot to answer for. "Oh my God." She backed a step off from him. "Duke, you're a _vampire?_ "

His smile spread out and for an instant his eyes flashed red, with maybe just a hint of silver for the briefest second, like two coins reflecting in there. Audrey's belly fluttered. She should be moving further away from him, but her feet didn't want to move in that direction at all. 

He was faster than the zombies -- faster than he should be. She barely saw him move, but he was suddenly in her space, his face pressed up against her neck, inhaling. "You smell _really_ good," he told her. "I can hear your little heart beating, so fast, _thump-thump_." His fingers stroked the skin of her jaw. "You're so hot." He reached behind her, sniffing, and brought his fingers back red. The injury to her shoulder had become a dull background agony in the face of the strain of surviving and continuing in the moment. He licked his finger. "You taste... delightful." She made a noise of protest, which stifled to a squeak as his face pressed into her neck, and she felt a light _nip_.

He didn't feel any warmer than Nathan had, his black pullover not seeming to seep any body heat -- his fashion choices hadn't changed, only colour choices, and it was so downright weird to think of a creature of the night wearing short pants that even in that moment she was kind of glad he was in jeans today. She pushed her hand to the 'V' of skin uncovered at his throat and ascertained that it wasn't just the layers between his skin and hers. He had no heat source within him. No pulse. No beating heart.

And what the hell was she doing, standing here letting him _nibble_ at her?! As if he had some hold over her that slowed and dulled her reactions, made her thoughts sluggish?

A sharper pain spiked into her neck and she went for a jab into a nerve cluster with her fingers, catching and twisting his hand from her at the same time. "No, no, _no_ ," she said, voice incredulous and tone flat. " _Oh,_ no! You are not... this isn't some freakin' _vampiric mesmer_ , is it?" She broke from his grip and staggered back. "I'm immune to the Troubles! Which means that this... this is my freakin' libido! _Twilight_ and Anne Rice have so much to fucking answer for!"

Her neck stung. There was blood on Duke's lips. He touched his fingers to it, then brought them away, staring at the red. It didn't sink into his skin, and his eyes didn't flash silver. Audrey had kind of wondered.

"I..." Duke stumbled over speech. " _Audrey?"_ His forehead creased. He was still slightly curled around his midriff where she'd jabbed him. His head was down, but his eyes stared up at her. Slowly, he looked down at the blood on his fingers again.

Audrey wiped her neck and looked down at her fingers, too, even as she drew her gun with her other hand. "You _bit_ me." She stared at him in challenge, trying to put from her thoughts how his dark hair and pale skin, black clothes, cloud of angst and little fangs fit a certain... a certain _image_ , that was hardwired into certain pleasure centres of her brain. "Duke? Do you remember being _Duke_?"

__

Please be Duke, she thought. Some hope that she could pull peopleback from this Trouble. That she wouldn't be stumbling alone through this nightmare in search of a solution, after she'd already lost Nathan.

"...Shit." Duke lurched more upright, scrubbing the blood from his mouth with both hands and his own clear, outright revulsion. "What the hell...?" She saw his tongue flick out over the remaining blood smear on his lip, unintentionally, automatically, and his eyes went hazy as pleasure flooded his face. For a moment, he looked at her again with that naked want.

Audrey stepped back and levelled the gun despite herself.

Then he shook his head, shook himself out of it, and it was just Duke, swearing a lot, wearing black. He backed off from her, extending a hand between them with a blocking palm turned her way. "I am _so_ sorry..."

They stared at each other.

"Do you _know_ me?" Audrey asked again.

"Yes. Yes, I do. Please do not shoot me for biting you in the neck." He flinched. "Jesus, Nathan's going to kill me." Her heart thudded unpleasantly at the reminder of Nathan's situation. "This is--" He laughed bitterly. "It's just all his paranoia about that fucking Trouble of mine come true. Do I dare even ask what happened to me?"

"It's some kind of horror movie Trouble," Audrey said, soberly. She couldn't quite make herself stop watching Duke with wary eyes. She didn't trust that he wasn't still dangerous. The Trouble still had him wearing black and sporting fangs, after all.

Duke paced for the door of the _Gull_ , also keeping his eyes on her, and maintaining his own wary distance. That didn't inspire her confidence much, either. "The thing is," he said, that near-hysteria laugh he sometimes had gathering under his voice, as though just beneath his surface he was battling hard against the urge to lose it, "you smell _really good_ to me right now, in a _really bad_ way... So I don't think you should come too close. Not to mention..." He stopped and reflexively licked his lips. His face froze... and he darted into the _Gull_ , turning his back on her and fleeing. As she stared after him, he flung back over his shoulder, "I need a drink! Alcohol, I mean, because... alcohol! We are definitely liking the alcohol right now."

"Yeah," muttered Audrey. She touched her neck again, and then followed him into the shadows of the bar. "Me, too. " 

He placed the counter between them and managed to slosh a generous amount of whiskey into a tumbler for her before succumbing to his urge to swig from the bottle.

A man was slumped face-down at the bar. Audrey finished off half her drink before going to him. She took his pulse -- nothing.

"That's John MacDee," Duke said. His tone was more normal: liquid fortification of a different sort, or just the chance to gather himself. As he tended to when stressed, he _chattered_. "Lives in here most days. Drinking away his savings since his wife left him. I figured he must have whiskey running in his veins by now, poor bastard. Maybe the alcohol content of his body will preserve him like one of those pickled saints."

Audrey winced. She worked her mouth, which was abruptly dry. The taste of the whiskey only seemed to dry it more. "Duke, I need to tell you… When this happened, most people changed into monsters, but... some of them seem to have just... _died_." She swallowed hard, and went for the rest of the whiskey glass in one large gulp. "Nathan died, Duke. I tried to... I tried CPR, for _ages_ , but it didn't do anything. I only hope it’s part of the Trouble. Something that will just _reset_..."

She saw the shock hit his expression, strain and grief pulling at the back of his eyes. He leaned over the bar and refilled her glass, and she gulped again, uncaring that he'd had his lips around the neck of the bottle, which meant, currently, vampire spit. Whatever.

"Nathan's not dead," he said, words flat. "You'll find a way to put this right."

She spread her hands. "The best ideas I have right now for _how_ involve riding around looking for someone else who isn't affected by this Trouble, based on the reasoning they must be the Troubled person. I've seen it, Duke. I drove here from the station. It's the whole of Haven. The whole town."

"Then that's what we'll do." His face set determinedly. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then shoved it away.

 _Nathan's in danger_ , Audrey thought. _He always tries to come through for Nathan when he needs it, even if they're at each other's throats half of the time even in bed._

She sighed to herself. So far, this week had been a better week. The argument of the day aside, her boys had been playing nice with each other. She thought back to them making love next to her as she'd dozed in bed that morning, sleepy enough to cry off the sexual acrobatics. The tensions between them all had backed off as they made up time after almost losing Nathan. And yeah, _losing Nathan_... It seriously felt like this was some cosmic joke, when it hadn't even been very long since they'd last done this. 

Duke looked back toward the door with trepidation, double-taking a bit. "Where is Nathan, this time? Your car -- is he--?"

Audrey shook her head. "I wish he _were_ in the trunk again. Then I'd know his body was _safe_. No, I had to leave him at the station. There were zombies there. We need to go get him as soon as possible." She shuddered. "Duke, I can't fight them. If they're all going to go back to being regular people when this Trouble clears up, I can't just start shooting people in the head!"

He pulled a face. "Yeah, that would suck." He leaned under the bar and drew out a shotgun.

"Duke!" she hissed. 

His eyes went stony. "The way I see it, we have to fix this _first_. If I have to do something bad to protect you..." His pause stretched. "It wouldn't be the first time."

She searched his face for a long moment.

"In the meantime," Duke added, "I'll just have to be damned sure I don't become the threat myself." He touched a fang with a knuckle, dubiously. "But then, kind of used to that part, too."

***

It was like a wall of oblivion hit him, smack between one word and the next. Full black-out for an instant, but he _did_ have a sense of certainty that very little time had passed. Then he was no longer standing at his desk talking to Audrey, but on the floor behind it. He could see her feet, still approximately where she'd been standing before his abrupt change of perspective.

Lacking sensation, he had no way to judge what had hit him -- what the hell it had _been_ \-- by feel. No pain, no other signals of any kind for clues. He'd need to move to examine himself. He looked up at Parker through chair and table legs, noticing a fallen pen that he had lost weeks ago, which had evidently rolled under the front of the file cabinet, and noticing also how badly the floor of his office needed to be cleaned. Audrey was moving, coming towards him, saying his name.

"I’m--" _All right_ , he was going to say, but was he? Nathan rolled and pushed upward with his hands. There was resistance -- a lot of it. He _felt,_ oddly, a kind of _pulling_ inside. It was both like and unlike sensation, and it couldn't _be_ sensation... He still felt nothing else, no signals from his knees and hands as they strained to lift him up. Then, the odd hint of sensation stopped and the resistance snapped quite suddenly. He lurched upright, too fast now, reeling when he got there. His balance was off. His body wasn't moving the ways he was accustomed to. He felt... too _light_ , like the movements came too easy, and he was _over_ moving; overreaching.

Something was very wrong with him.

Nathan looked down to check for blood and froze at the sight of his own face staring up at him from the floor. Unmoving, features slack as he'd never seen them, and the expression he was wearing wasn't a great one, but -- still, that was definitely him.

Couldn't be. He was standing _right here_. He was--

He glanced down the length of his body, something he needed to do anyway, to assess potential injury.

...Wait, what?

He held his hands out and gazed _through_ them.

Staring through his own transparent hands at what decidedly _looked like_ his own dead body, there seemed little argument he could raise against the nature of the situation he was in.

Audrey had dropped down next to his body on the floor. She'd not looked at _him_ at all. Nathan stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak, reaching down to her shoulder to show her what had happened to him, but she only had any attention for the body on the floor, and he realised she wasn't seeing _him_.

A flicker in the corner of his eyes turned into a blur coming right at him; a blur who might've been clad in jeans and denim shirt, but was as monochrome and transparent as his own form. Nathan cried out as the world slid sideways and there was a sort of -- of _not-sensation_ , again, not really, but a sort of a _zzap_. The internal structure of a brick wall went past his eyes too quickly and then he was blinking and even more transparent in the dimming daylight outside, staggering in the street.

The entity that had pushed him gave a raucous laugh, letting him regain balance and bearings as he circled Nathan. "Well, ain't this a turn-up. Knew if I hung around long enough, something interesting would happen. That's the thing about this town. Now we're back on more even footing again."

 _Max Hansen_. Nathan's first instinct, after that first and only encounter at the earth rupture, was to reach for his gun in spite of what he now knew. That encounter had been full of undercurrents of threat and an instinctive scream of _danger!_ through every cell of his numb body. Unfortunately, he was not sure at all what threat a gun represented, here, in this new situation, so he paused with his hand crooked behind him. He spun slowly to follow Max's progress around him and said, "I know who you are now."

Max's grin was as broad and as empty of conscience as it had been when he was alive. That wheedling, coaxing persuasiveness that played on the idea that _threat_ was never far away; the dangerous glint in his eyes. He spread his arms, halfway, not quite committing to fully extending them, too wary by habit to leave himself that open. The grin dwindled until it was just a crooked flash of teeth at the corner of his mouth. "So how about it? Hug for the old man?"

Nathan jerked his head side-to-side once. "No. Not you," he said. The rest of his brain started to catch up and add things together. "You're… you died."

"Bingo." Max clicked his finger and angled his head. "Give the boy a gold star. I figured I'd hang around and haunt Garland, only things turned out even better. Might've killed me, but it didn't do him any good in the end. Didn't get to live long enough to enjoy it, did he?"

"Shut up," Nathan snapped. If Max had more of that to expand on, he didn't want to hear it. But what was Max _doing_ here? Was this a Trouble? Or was Max really a-- a damn _ghost_? Could it be related to what had happened to Nathan, when Max had already been dead for months? "Are you haunting me?" he asked incredulously.

"Haunting the Chief. Pieces came down and that turned out to be you. Pretty funny, seeing my own flesh and blood sitting in that chair." Max stopped circling Nathan like he was up for auction and stood and bounced a bit on the balls of his ghostly feet.

"I've never noticed a thing," Nathan said blankly, confused and frankly appalled. He didn't know what to do with this man; had barely had chance to talk to him in life, and hadn't _known_ the connection between them at the time. Hadn't known to look for him, and still couldn't quite understand how the inconsistencies that said he wasn't Garland Wuornos' biological son had managed to escape his notice for so long. There was also a skittering unease somewhere inside him, that told him there were things he would remember if he let himself, but that he very much didn't want to do that. Terrors lurked in the lost corners of his memory.

"No, you didn't." Max's expression soured, and Nathan's mind was racing so fast it took a moment to remember what he was responding to. "Ain't you supposed to have keen observational skills, wearing that badge?" He waved a hand. "Then again, suppose I can't blame you for being about as sensitive as a rock." He gave a high-pitched hoot of laughter that sounded manic.

Nathan couldn't stop staring at him, jaw hanging.

It was one-on-one, but Nathan couldn't help but feel overmatched. He didn't understand his situation -- what could have happened to _kill him,_ all of a sudden? And was that truly what had happened? -- and hadn't begun to process or accept his current state, and Max clamouring in front of him was a block on figuring out anything. 

Max was between Nathan and the police station's exterior wall. Audrey was on the other side of the wall... and Audrey always had so many of the answers. When Nathan tried to circle around, Max moved to continue blocking him.

Nathan paused. He didn't have any sense he could win this fight, and Audrey -- she hadn't been able to see him. Could he _make_ her see him, somehow? Neither of them had ever noticed Max hanging about. Unless Nathan had actually had a sudden heart attack or stroke, though, wasn't this more likely to be a Trouble than anything else? If it was a Trouble, did that mean he even counted as being legitimately dead, the way Max was? The rules might not be the same. 

...But then, last time there had been an undead Trouble, Audrey had not been able to see the ghosts.

Nathan still had to _try_ to get back to her. He moved, steeling his body like a battering ram to shove through Max, the way he'd do with Duke, or anyone, relying on having a body that didn't feel to give him the upper hand, make him an unstoppable force. But Max proved to be an immovable object. They sort of bounced off each other with another _zzap!_ Max had obviously been expecting it, more used to this status, and his reflexes were faster. He fisted his hands in Nathan's collar and dragged at him, pushing him back out into the road. They stumbled through a parked car, and the sudden surge of impossible views as his head slid clear through the roof just at nose-level startled Nathan enough that he yelled again.

He wheeled his arms, failing to lock them onto anything -- car, lamp post, a second car stopped askew in the street. He tried to dig his heels in but the ground felt like it had turned the consistency of treacle, providing no leverage. It took him more time than it ought to process and reason through enough to thrust his hands forward and latch onto Max instead.

Max was touching him, after all. Nathan curled his fingers into Max's ghostly shirt and clung on tight in return. "Stop it!" he yelled. Panic was... decently buried, at the least, but still more present in his voice than he'd like. Anger was a part of it, too, but by no means as much as it should be. There was something... something that particularly bothered him about _Max_.

He'd thought about this, of course. Read the file, seen hints of something dark that wasn't mentioned, wasn't relevant in the police records, though it should have been damned relevant between Garland and himself. Just something else he'd needed to know that the Chief had never shared with him. A man like Max, all controlled violence... It couldn't have been a _happy_ family life. Could it?

Nathan didn't remember. He'd sat scouring his memory for hours, after dad died and he'd learned about Max, but he didn't remember Max, and he didn't remember anything else that might connect to Max.

He _just didn't know._ If Max had mistreated his mother, mistreated _him_ , the experience had left no echo in his brain. All he had was the psychosomatic churning in his gut. He could slam his fist into that face, older, broader and greyer than his but with so many more similarities than he'd ever seen in Garland's features, but it wouldn't bring any satisfaction. Wouldn't bring anything. In this matter, he was an emotional blank as much as he was a physical one. 

He didn't know -- nor did he want to know. Max might be his real father, but Max was a violent criminal lowlife, and Nathan had had Garland, which meant he hadn't any damn need to seek out a connection with Max.

He angrily started to struggle to peel Max's grip off him as the roil of psychological nausea subsided and things... well, they didn't _level out_ , but returned to what seemed like more normal levels of tension for the situation of apparently being a ghost who was being dragged around by another ghost with an axe to grind.

"No," Max said sternly, like Nathan was somehow his to command. "Watched you walk away once. Not happening again, not when I've finally got my hands on you. Can you imagine what it's like -- your own flesh and blood right there, day in, day out, but not being able to reach out and touch?" He barked another laugh. "I guess we both know _that_ but, boy, it just went and hit a whole new level, I'm telling you. Not being able to communicate... Been waiting a long time for this. I'm betting Garland fed you all kinds of lies."

Nathan said, "Garland didn't 'feed me' anything." Was Max seriously expecting to carry out a meaningful conversation while they were grappling like this?

"You can deny it all you--"

"No, he _didn't_. He didn't lie. He didn't bother to tell me anything! Damn it, let me _go_ \--!" Nathan hauled again and managed to break the grip of one of Max's hands. He swung away, hoping the other grip would fail, but it didn't. They fell through the walls into the coffee shop across the road from the police station, still clamped together.

Max latched onto a shelf of cups and plates. It rattled... Damn it, if Max could affect substantial things, why couldn't Nathan? There was obviously a knack to it... He flailed out his hands for the edge of the counter, focusing hard on that angle of polished wood, but still failed to connect. Max started dragging him closer again. There was a woman behind the counter, but she didn't seem to have noticed either the two of them, or the rattling shelf in the real world. Her head was down and she was barely moving. Customers seemed particularly sparse. One lone man slumped over a table, unconscious or dead.

Something had definitely happened, Nathan realised fully, then, because it _wasn't just him_.

"Wait. Wait! _Wait!"_ he gasped at Max. "You want to talk, we can talk. I swear, I won't try to run--" If he was no longer attached to his body, why did his voice sound like he was gasping for breath? Habit, he supposed. He spread his arms out, stopping his attempts to grip Max or anything else. "You know what's happening here? What happened to _me?_ "

Max slowly came to a rest, too, shaking Nathan briefly one last time. "Looked like it got real crowded all of a sudden," he said. "That's Troubles for you." He frowned, eyes shifting. "You really saying Garland never told you a thing? I guess it's no real surprise if you don't remember me -- damn Troubles -- but it must've stuck in his craw something bad to go all those years and not whisper one spit of an insult on my name to my own son when he had your ear all to himself."

Garland wasn't like that, but Nathan didn't say it. He'd thought about Max a lot, kind of profiled Max in a way: the grudge against Garland had to have loomed large in Max's life through all those years in Shawshank. Protesting wouldn't counter that or help his current situation.

"Am I dead?" Nathan rasped. About that, at least, Max might _care._ Seemed to regard Nathan almost as property, the way he was carrying on.

"...Huh. That would be a downer," Max agreed. "Counted on grandkids one day, even if I'd have to watch 'em play with their daddy's gun and badge. This Trouble kicked in, seemed to me like a whole lot of people croaked fast. Missus behind the counter ain't dead, though. At least... not like we are." He stood back and released his grip, reluctantly, from Nathan, so they could both go and investigate. He was hesitant, casting Nathan narrow-eyed glances back and making very sure he followed.

Kathy Jay, the coffee shop owner, didn't look at all like herself. Max stood in front of her, smacked his hands together and yelled "Boo!" in her face. Nathan didn't know if she was supposed to react to that -- if she could have reacted -- because apparently he'd been working in a haunted office for months without noticing anything. He was pretty sure Max would have tried to get his attention.

Kathy sort of shambled against the counter, trying to walk but not seeming to realise it was in the way. Nathan peeped under her curtain of hair and thought that her shadowed eyes seemed dead, perhaps whited over.

"Maybe it's a temporary death, if this Trouble gets fixed," Max commented, whisking an arm through Kathy's middle. "Zombie. Right. Not much for those kind of movies, but I know that much." He transferred a pointing finger from her to Nathan, and Nathan didn't feel it, but it did seem to stop at his substance again. So they could interact with each other, but not necessarily with everything else. "Ghost. Nearing Halloween, is it? I'd have to ask. Not as big a thing from this side as they say it is."

"Temporary death I've done before," Nathan said with irony, and Max looked vaguely interested and perplexed, and it was a relief to know he wasn't following everything Nathan did. Maybe he was stuck mostly in the vicinity of the police station. Nathan set his jaw, glaring at Max. "Whether it's temporary or not, if this is widespread there must be a lot of scared people out there, and there has to be a Trouble behind it. I need to get out there and start doing my job."

Max's sneer was some part genuinely very amused. "Well, ain't you just the little badge-toting do-right." The rest of the sentiment radiating from him was nasty. "It's just like Garland's got his hand up your ass throwing his voice. Too bad that old bastard ain't around any more. Seems I owe him back for hell of a lot more than killing me."

"If it helps, you killed each other," Nathan snapped, "more or less." He took a breath -- and even if he couldn't interact with the world and was therefore presumably not drawing in any air, all the signals he had still worked as if he were drawing breath. This situation… was not ideal. But he had to try and work with it. Max could perhaps still be a resource. " _Max_. If you're my real father, then _help me_ with this. We can work together."

Max rolled his head on his neck, face twisting like he'd swallowed a bee. "I'll take a look," he grudgingly admitted. "Hell, I want to know what's going on here, too."

Nathan took a step back, cautiously nodding to the older man. He resisted again the urge to let his hand stray to his gun. His form and everything he'd had on his person when he was reduced to this state were intangible now. It seemed to him they were very unlikely to encounter any exterior threat he could use the gun against, but _Max_ \-- there was no way in Hell he really planned to trust Max. A ghost weapon might still work on someone in the same state, and he didn't want to draw Max's attention to it or force a confrontation yet. Though it might be futile to hope that someone as dangerous as Max wasn't already well aware of its presence.

"So Garland isn't here?" he asked, as they paced each other, neither letting the other drop a step behind, to the front of the shop, and out _through_ the front of the shop.

Max flapped an impatient hand. "Moved on to whichever-wherever-whatever. I never believed that horseshit, but then, never believed in ghosts, and look at me now."

"I see." Nathan's small hopes of seeing his proper father again faded. They would probably only have argued anyway. He wondered about his mother, or Dr Carr, but Max didn't seem the ideal person to ask.

In his brief glimpse of the street before -- his head being pushed through cars was a barrier to any keen observation -- he hadn't registered much beyond that things seemed off. Walking out into it now, still pacing Max, a cautious four or five feet between them, it was clear that the character of the town had changed. It seemed like night was falling already, the landscape gripped in a half-dark twilight. Buildings loomed, with ominous shapes and cavernous shadows they'd never had before. Haven was a pretty, bright town with a lot of grass and open space. The transformation shouldn't have been possible, yet here it was.

Nathan thought he could hear distant screaming. He turned his head, but couldn't pin down the source direction. Perhaps the unsettling sound was coming from more than one source.

As for the people out in the street...

"They're movie monsters," Max said, pointing. "I've seen that one. Twenty-odd years of Tuesday night movie night at Shawshank. That was Halloween year before last."

A hollow-eyed man was shuffling past like some sort of... of _ghoul_ , and he stared at Nathan, pale eyes slowly blinking. His mouth fell slightly open to reveal needle sharp fangs. Not like a vampire's duo of pronounced canines, but a whole mouth _full_ of them.

"You can see--?" Nathan saw the oncoming movement and lunged at the same time the transformed man did, ghoulish hand flapping out. Neither of them connected. Maybe Nathan could be seen, by some people, but he still couldn't be touched. Max gave a derisive snort. Nathan whirled a full circle on one heel, studying the 'people' around them, watching where their gazes fell and where they stopped. He made a few lunges toward others. Some reacted, but others didn't.

"You let me know when you've finished horsing around, there, boy," Max jeered.

"...All right." Nathan gathered himself. This… was more an expression of frustration than achieving anything. "We should get back to Audrey." He pointed to the police station across the street. "I need to tell her what happened." Hell, he'd left her with his own lifeless body, when Max pulled him away. What might she be thinking right now? _Trouble_ , he repeated to himself. _It has to be a Trouble. Of course she'll know that. Audrey won't be grieving for me, she'll be trying to fix this._

" _That_ girl?" Max's eyebrows raised, watching him too closely, shaking his head. "She'll be fine. No. Don't you _know_ what she is, fool?"

"What do you think she is?" Nathan grit out, prepared to fight on this. More people were passing them, now, not all of them adjusting their course for the fact Nathan and Max were in the way. A cadaverous Hammer Horror figure staggered straight through him, jolting him back a few paces as an odd resistance pushed at him. Some things -- some creatures -- could maybe affect him more than others. He wondered what it would have been like to feel that. Probably very odd. He supposed he had to wonder if his Trouble was actually even still in force, or if this was what it was like to be a ghost. No body, after all. He didn't see any point asking Max, who was the same as him. Would he even know?

He eyed the older man, mulling the idea over, and didn't get chance to ask.

That hovering background scream was coming closer. Or... not _quite_ , since as it drew really close, it resolved into a very specific scream, and Nathan could now see its owner. A man, stricken-faced, wailing as he ran down the street. His form was as insubstantial and faintly glowing as their own forms, and Nathan knew him. He stepped out automatically to intercept the panicked spirit, catching Baylen Mellers by the shoulders. He was knocked back, but this time it only seemed like the basic rules of momentum were at work. The strength equation with Baylen wasn't nearly so uneven as with Max. He filed that note away for later.

"Just calm down!" Nathan exclaimed.

"This is the worst nightmare ever!" Baylen moaned, covering his face.

They'd been in the same class at school, and Baylen had been the golden boy back _then_ , but ever since, his life had slowly declined, never quite managing the success predicted so boldly for him during his school years. As time wore on, Nathan had grown accustomed to seeing him moping about town events, almost invisible among the rich and the bigwigs, spending his family's money and failing to make any impact on the world of his own. Clinging to the coattails of his wealthy relatives and, mostly, avoiding life.

It seemed best not to try dissuade him from what he'd already decided this was.

"You're okay," Nathan told him. "You just need to calm down. Stop running before you--" Could he damage himself? Sure, he wasn't technically attached to his body right now, but would any damage carry back to it once the Trouble was over? Nathan patted him on the shoulder and, gauging the response, cautiously let him go when he was fairly sure Baylen wouldn't just start running again.

"Everyone's m-monsters," the unhappy man sobbed.

"Are they?" Nathan murmured, and more pointedly asked, "What happened to you? What did you see?"

"Geoff was a... he turned into this _thing_. Claws. Grey fur. Strings of drool. He went for Gary, but Gary was something else, something _worse…_ the skin was hanging off him, like a walking skeleton, and they started fighting instead. I saw m-my own body, dead!" He clutched at Nathan and hyperventilated.

Max chuckled at the spectacle, but it wound down to something more sober. "If everyone's monsters out for blood," he observed, "then there's no prey for them here. Haven't yet seen anyone looked like they stayed human."

"Parker would have," Nathan said. "The Troubles don't affect her... We have to go _back_ to the station!"

Max's arch look, sarcasm and veiled physical threat couldn't delay them this time. Maybe it was having Baylen there, and hauling Baylen around on his arm, someone having a worse crisis who _needed_ Nathan, bringing out his sense of responsibility and the strength to use to defy Max along with it.

But when they got back to the station, there was no sign of Audrey. "Damn it -- she's already left--" Nathan stared around helplessly. Officer Danny Rayner was walking repeatedly into walls, but didn't pay any of their party any heed. Nathan marched back down to his office and, mentally steeling himself again for it, _through_ the door. His body was on the floor behind the desk. He dropped down and pushed his hand into it. " _Come on!"_ He could do this. He wasn't dead, he was _right here_!

It didn't feel any different to anything else -- it didn't _feel_ \-- but that didn't have to mean anything. He lay back, trying to match his position to his own slumped physical form.

"You can't get back inside it!" Max said with disgust.

Nathan didn't trust him enough to take his word on that, but after he figured he'd given it a decent try, he left his lifeless form alone and rolled out of it, back onto his ghostly feet. "It was worth a try," he said snappishly to Max's judging look. He cast around, frustration and worry bubbling inside him. "I need to find Audrey. She's in danger."

"And exactly what are you planning to do about that when you find her?" Max asked, folding his arms.

If he'd had his _body_ again, then _something_ , Nathan thought, frustrated and annoyed. It seemed there wasn't anything he could do that would win this guy's approval. But he was used to that from father figures. "I can touch some of the creatures a little, maybe," he argued. "I can figure it out. There's _something_ I can do. And trying is better than doing _nothing_. Parker's our best bet to put this town back to rights."

"Always been that woman," Max said, gritting his teeth a bit. He squinted hard at Nathan, spotting some give-away in that reaction. "You hitting that, boy?"

Even though he couldn't feel and was currently monochrome, Nathan was sure his form was blushing somehow. Embarrassment would find a way. He was also suddenly horribly certain that he didn't want Max to find out the rest of the picture as to what, exactly, he was 'hitting' -- to find out about Duke.

"Can you make a phone call?" Nathan asked, pointing back down at his body, by their feet. Max was actually standing in his midriff. Baylen was looking close to a freak-out. "There's a phone in my left side jacket pocket. Audrey's in contacts under 'Parker'."

"I ain't doing that," Max said, shaking his head. "Technology's fiddly. Messes up your energies if you get it wrong. No gain in it for me, either."

"How about that your own son is asking you--" Nathan began with impatience.

Max just sneered. "Aw, you quit that, trying to call on us having some kind of relationship, when I'm damn sure you don't care spit for me. Garland addled your brain good, raised you into his little soldier..."

Nathan ignored that as the only _possible_ approach and countered, "Haven's your home, too. Do you _really_ want to stand by and watch this happening to it?"

"Breaks up the monotony," Max drawled with a shrug.

Clenching both fists and trying to hold onto his temper, Nathan looked at Baylen. "Can you...?"

Baylen wafted a hand through the nearby desk. "Hey, man, I can't touch anything either!" The edge of panic in his voice cautioned Nathan. Baylen didn't need this, didn't need anyone putting demands on him -- he _needed_ reassurance. And he wouldn't be the only one.

With a last look down at his body on the floor, Nathan backed off, beckoning the others and letting the wall swallow him up, emerging on the grassy slope heading down to the street. He couldn't quell the odd reluctance to part himself from his physical form, or the feeling that he was leaving behind a -- a -- at least a _resource_ , for want of a better word, if he could only figure out how to put it to use.

"So what's your plan, 'Chief'?" Max asked, sarcastically.

Baylen was looking very nervous of Max, but Nathan could not reasonably think of a way to get rid of his nightmare father that didn't hold a high risk of making the situation worse, escalating it into ghostly violence. As long as he was only a verbally disruptive presence, Nathan supposed that he could and would have to cope with that. "We're going to check out the rest of the town. Help where we can. Look for Parker -- my police partner -- on the way," he said tightly.

Baylen snickered, "She's more than that, if I've heard right."

Max's snorted derision hadn't been made any less derisive by Nathan's bid to take charge.

"You don't have to come," Nathan said, not even bothering to nurse a dim spark of hope.

"What? Hey, now, boy... This is my chance to see the chip off the old granite block in action. Wouldn't miss that treat for all the world..."

***


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's a scene from a fic which is not mine that seems to have cemented itself as part of my headcanon, where a very young Nathan holds a gun on Max to protect his mother. A paragraph in this chapter references that scene. I will try to track down the fic it came from and properly name and link to it here, but if you recognise it, do let me know.

PART 2

It had been a joint decision that they go in Duke's truck, and that he should drive. That way, Audrey could keep her attention on him in case things went... hinky.

Duke was pretty sure he wasn't his normal self, because his normal self should have been freaking out a whole lot more about... oh, the little sharp _fangs_ he could feel nipping at his lip when he smiled, or the way Audrey still _smelled_ to him, like something amazing, but not so much in the manner of a beautiful woman, or man, not in a _sensual_ or _sexual_ way -- more like a gourmet dish calling to his appetite. His ears didn't seem to be too sensitive to the other small details of the world around him, but it felt like his hearing had been amped up a hundredfold when it came to picking up her heartbeat loud and clear. Inside his own chest, he was well aware that there was no matching echo.

Instead of freaking out, his current self occasionally drifted into the thoughts and smiled... until he caught himself and struck that expression off his face before Audrey saw it. Ironic how it was the fangs that helped him catch himself: that little nip as they dug in when he smiled bringing him back to reality.

If she knew what he was thinking, what he was fighting to hold down, Audrey would never trust him again. Right now, he wanted to take her in the worst way -- and sure, he'd taken Audrey a hundred times, with Nathan watching or varyingly joining in, and even a few they'd snuck behind Nathan's back because he still got pissy about that (even though he and Duke did it and Duke damned well knew that he and Audrey _also_ did it), but this... He ached to throw her down and take what he wanted: sink his teeth into her delicate throat while he was inside her and feel her blood rush into him as he fucked her...

It would be sweet and warm with her life. It would...

Yeah. He was going to sit here shuffling uncomfortably in his seat and focus very hard on _driving_.

"Back at the police station," Audrey was saying, all business and no idea as to the content of his rogue thoughts, "I can get a taser. I should be able to subdue the monsters without killing the townsfolk, that way. Just bad luck I don't have one with me, today. Now Dwight's around so much, I often do."

"Mmh. Good idea," Duke said. It rather depended, he thought, on whether a taser would work on what he seemed to have become. He kept himself in shape, but the sort of strength that he could feel lurking in potential when he moved his body now was a level up from that. "Wonder if we should try to break the Teagues out of this Trouble to see if they know anything that could, um, help." He didn't want to be alone with Audrey, next to the allure of her scent and her heartbeat, where every moment that he kept himself under control felt like a major achievement. That was _not good_ , so company, and distraction, and someone else to intervene when he finally fucking lost it, seemed like a plan.

He'd never forgive himself if he did that to her. He kept looping the reminder through his head. He loved her. Her and Nathan... and _Nathan_... Nathan would kill him...

If Nathan weren't already dead.

That gloomy focus made it a little bit easier to drive back his own shadows.

"But we're lovers, and that was only just enough to bring you around to some semblance of yourself," Audrey told him, still oblivious to her danger. "And you're still _barely_ in control." Okay, maybe not so oblivious. So much for how well he was disguising it.

"I don't know," Duke offered, "Vince is pretty damn fond of you." He risked a glance toward her in the passenger seat. She looked unhappy, a 'v' of tension between her brows as she stared ahead. "Hey, you're supposed to be watching _me_. Wake up."

"Come on, Duke," she said, giving him a squashed smile. "I do trust you. You know that, right?" She reached out and squeezed his arm above the elbow, and looked at him earnestly out of puppy dog eyes. Duke couldn't help but reflect on how she _did_ that: put her faith in you almost like a weapon. So much faith that you'd be horribly ashamed to fall short of it.

"...Okay." She barked a short laugh and grinned, deflating the moment. "Now, you can stop staring at my neck." She gestured with a twitch of her finger to point his eyes forward to the road again -- and then her strained attempt to foster a lighter tone was swallowed into real panic and an urgent yelp. "Zombie! Zombie on the road!"

Duke yanked his head around, and the wheel, swerving to avoid the ginger haired youth with the blank face and rotting features who'd shuffled right into the path of the truck. Duke yelled rather louder than Audrey did as he missed the zombie by inches and ploughed into the roadside, cutting deep tracks in the soft grass.

He shook his head clear and raised it with a growl, and glared at the zombie still weaving its clumsy way across the road ahead. "You know what's ridiculous? If everyone's turned into a monster, then there's no-one to be the victims... What happens if a vampire and a zombie fight? Who bites who? Is it anything but _pointless_?"

Audrey struggled up against her seatbelt and cast him a worn look. "Well, it's the one thing that offers some hope maybe no-one _dies_ from this Trouble, if everyone resets to their original state once it's over."

Duke grimaced, and fixed his eyes forward, straight ahead out of the windscreen, picking out a distant scene. "You forget one thing. There's still an open road into this damned little town from the world outside."

Audrey craned her head to follow his gaze and swore. "Damn it, we have to--"

"I know, I know, I know--" Duke swore in a mantra as he tried to reverse his reluctant and partially stuck truck. He remembered at the last moment to check the position of that lone wandering zombie, as he realised he could no longer _see it_ , and barely missed reversing into it as he changed his course. It went past about a foot from his window, and Duke got a good look. "...Huh." He almost stopped the truck accidentally as he blinked in recognition. "Gas station guy. Do you notice, Audrey, if there's a high number of people from the customer services industries changed into these things?"

"Not funny," she said. "Go!"

...Yeah. Duke slewed them around with a screech of brakes and slammed his foot on the pedal, speeding them toward the poor schmuck who was about to be dead. He didn't slow the car as they approached the group of people on the road up ahead, though he did relent a little as Audrey squeaked in accusation.

Didn't want to kill anyone. Check.

"You think I can _fight_ that many?" he yelped back at her as he ploughed into the near side of the group, picking off three of them in one move.

A car was stopped askew off the road -- probably had done exactly what Duke just had, swerving to avoid a zombie. Clearly not a good idea. Even without the three he'd knocked flat, half a dozen others were still tearing at the car. The driver's door was open and a girl shrieked as a zombie clutched at her, teeth worrying into a captured arm.

"Jesus Christ," Duke muttered. He got out of the truck and lunged into the fight, aiming first for the zombie who had hold of the girl. Others got in the way, though, causing him to waste time and effort dealing with them. He tossed one clean over the car and shoved the other down and stomped on it on his way to help the girl.

"Holy Batman, Batman!" Audrey exclaimed wildly, but he barely paid any attention to that. The girl... had the zombie's teeth sunk in her arm, chewing an increasingly messy wound and creating a lot of bright, beckoning red blood. It _wasn't_ Audrey, and some not-so-gallant part of Duke was jumping up and down with glee, insisting that meant it would be okay. Hell, he was saving them from zombies! They'd just eat her regardless. What was a little blood?

The other occupant of the car, a man, shoved open the passenger side door straight into a zombie's face. Now the numbers were reduced, he was getting out to help, too. Duke couldn't really blame him for staying put and trying to hang onto the girl from inside the car, before, when things had looked bloody hopeless. The guy got out, kicking at another zombie's kneecap repeatedly with a gurgling approximation of a battle yell. He got past that one as its leg collapsed, then threw himself over the hood, getting to his girlfriend at about the same time as Duke.

"Tina!" He kept yelling her name as he and Duke pulled her attacker away, and that kind of ruined things for Duke's thoughts of a guilt-free meal. That, and now... there was something increasingly sour, he felt, about the smell of her blood. This close in, it still looked enticing, but he found he didn't want it at all. She was abruptly very easy to resist.

He turned to check his back and found Audrey close behind him. She gave him a tight nod. Her eyes said she'd been worried, but spoke of approval now. She thought he'd asserted his own control over the urge. She didn't know about the stink.

There were other zombies still left to deal with. The thing about zombies, at least they were _slow_. Duke shoved one into the trunk of the car, which hadn't fared so well as his truck after its crash and was all banged up on one side. He unconcernedly slammed the trunk shut and ignored the slow banging that started up. The couple clung to each other and eyed the banging car nervously. There was blood on the guy's face, but he'd been bitten as well, and the unappetising stink also coated him.

"Get into the truck," Audrey ordered, pushing at them. Duke wondered if he should say something, but really, he didn't want that conversation. He didn't know what was going to happen to them, and they definitely couldn't leave them here, as they were, human and clinging to each other while the zombies they'd just put down were all in various states of getting up again. Audrey had the only workable idea.

They got in the truck, the dude taking his jacket off and wrapping it around and around the girl's mangled arm to try stem the bleeding. That at least took it out of Duke's sight. But even Audrey didn't smell very good now, stuck in the confines of the truck with those two contaminating the air. Duke slammed his foot down again and they screeched away from the cluster of zombies, heading back in toward town.

"Oh my God, oh my God!" the girl yelled. If she was that vocal, the blood loss couldn't be too bad. "It's the zombie apocalypse! I knew it... we _knew_ it! We were supposed to be _ready_ , Mike!" She punched the guy. Duke snickered despite himself, and covered his smile with a hand as it earned him a glare from Audrey.

"You wanted to bring three handbags and six pairs of shoes on vacation!" the guy babbled back. "There was no room for the freakin' survival kit!"

"It's not the zombie apocalypse," Audrey said. "It's... It's just a local outbreak. It'll be over soon."

"Yeah, but every apocalypse has to start with a local outbreak," Mike countered, obviously a logician. "Think about it."

"Doesn't matter to us," Tina told him, her voice bitter. "We've been bitten! We aren't going to survive it."

"Hey, now," Audrey said, turning around, knee on her seat, arm hanging onto the backrest. "We don't know how these zombies work... or even what they really are. We don't know that they're contagious."

Duke sped up the car a little. He listened to Audrey trying to pep talk the couple, but beyond the fact they probably had two of those annoying things now in the car, he didn't really care. He examined that coldness in him. He remembered the vampires on _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , which he had totally watched for Joss Whedon's writing and not just for Sarah Michelle Geller doing high kicks. Did this mean he didn't have a soul? Had the Trouble taken his soul? Or did it still suggest he had one if he was bothered enough by the thought to worry about it? Then again, he wasn't _that_ bothered, and as to whether he'd had a soul to begin with... whether anyone did...

Duke's ponderings on the Big Questions of the Universe were interrupted by a hard poke in the arm and Audrey leaning in to hiss aggravatedly in his ear, " _Stop. Humming!"_

He supposed the cheery sound might not be appreciated in the current context.

It hardly mattered. By the time he pulled up outside the police station, their passengers were still and sluggish. Tina's face had gone blank and she latched her fingers into Audrey's hair when Audrey tried to rouse her. Duke had to go around and haul her from the car to make her let go. Mike was quieter, but he'd gotten less of a dose and slightly later, so it was probably slower acting.

"We can't do anything for them," Duke said. "Let's just get them out of the truck. They can't stay with us. They'll be as safe as any of them, wandering about, now."

"Hopefully they'll go back, too, when this Trouble ends," Audrey said sadly. She frowned as she watched Duke pull Mike out and set him on the pavement, then slam shut and double-check the doors. Tina was staggering up from where he'd pushed her already.

"Just walk fast," Duke said. "They're slow as hell."

"You don't feel bad, do you?" Audrey pushed. "Not even a little bit. The Duke that I know..."

"I... kind of feel bad that I don't feel bad?" Duke tried. "Does that count?" It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest that she try touching him -- maybe just holding his hand -- and see if her anti-Trouble influence had any effect. But now they were away from the stink of the infected Tina and Mike, he could smell her so _clearly_ again, and her warm skin touching his would be... _No_. Absolutely not. "Besides, did you notice? Her arm, when the jacket fell off? The blood had stopped. That wound was a mess. Considering the state of this town and any medical care she could access right now, she's probably safer like this until the Trouble's over."

"Assuming she turns back," Audrey said, her voice a dry rasp.

Duke shrugged. "Let's go and pick up Nathan." He did shiver, then, with the thought that the Trouble might not reverse.

"We need to close off the roads into town," Audrey said, strained. "If we were in Nathan's truck, we'd at least have had police tape. I'll have to pick up some of that, too."

The police station was... too quiet, as the old cliché went. Duke started to feel a distinct nervousness building despite himself. He didn't want to see Nathan's dead body. He had a horror that he'd be able to tell somehow that he was _really dead_ , and there was nothing they could do this time. But he took the lead down the corridors. Not so much to protect Audrey from what they might encounter as to continue protecting her from himself. That she went along with that plan, when he was the civilian here, pretty much told him she knew that.

"He's just in our office," she said, her voice low. They hadn't seen anyone or any _thing,_ except another dead man under a table in the main office -- a uniformed officer Duke only vaguely knew by sight. Audrey took a deep breath before she moved to push open the door. Nathan was right there, long body stretched out on the floor.

"Shit." Duke was across the room dropping on one knee to touch Nathan's face and verify its cold with barely a thought for his reticence to encounter Nathan's dead body. "This is turning into a bad habit, man."

Nathan didn't reply, obviously. His blue eyes were open, glazed and waxy. It was freaky, but Duke was not about to draw them closed as he would the dead. Death hadn't stuck last time and they'd fix it this time, too. Those eyes, as well, seemed to Duke to have a hint of life still in them, even if Nathan's skin was dead and cold. He wasn't going to snuff that out.

A foot scuffing on the floor reminded him Audrey was watching. He looked up and found her face directing a softer expression at him -- at both of them. She caught herself and returned to business, and Duke nodded back in response to her brisk tip of her head as he gathered Nathan up in his arms. He knew full well that Nathan was a heavy bastard, for all that he was skinny, but picking him up now was remarkably easy compared to all the other times Duke had had occasion to do so, sadly only some of which had been x-rated. Duke juggled the weight in his arms a bit until he was balanced and Nathan's head curled in against the side of Duke's neck, hair soft and ticklish there. The newly-dead smelled neutral, he discovered, which was a bit of a relief. Not bad the way the zombies smelled, but not appealing like Audrey. It would have been hard to resist sinking his teeth into Nathan's throat if he'd smelled like Audrey. He wasn't more than an hour dead, so there had to be liquid blood in there still, but apparently the pulse was important.

"I swear, you spend way too much time dead," Duke murmured to him as he negotiated around the desk and then through the corridors. Audrey had a taser in her hand now, and moved with him, watchful and ready. "This had better be temporary."

They came down out of the main entrance of the police station and Duke bumped into Audrey as she stopped. He followed her gaze and cursed at the sight of the bunch of black-clad youths around his truck. The two of them hunkered down on the steps in a fashion that didn't really count as hiding.

Duke recognised a couple of the bunch. He had, in fact, sold them weed, and gotten lip when he told them he didn't have anything stronger (which was kind of a lie, but that stuff was for personal use and friends, and he definitely wasn't peddling the shit to schoolkids). He didn't know if they were at school anymore, but they still hung around town doing not-much, except getting wasted or stoned or wrecked on a regular basis.

"What do all the little junkies turn into when the horror movie Trouble comes to town?" Duke muttered. Then he thought about it. "Fuck _me_."

Audrey's eyes widened slightly. "You think there's a connection..." Her face cleared in comprehension. "Of course. It's your Trouble. You're practically a vampire already, in a way."

Duke winced. "Yeah. So I suck blood. Those little needy suckers are on any other substance they can get their hands on. Fucking video shop clerk turned into a zombie, of course, and the garage guy, or maybe the zombies are just the default option, since there sure are a lot of them, whatever. And the living dead... died." He looked down at Nathan, in his arms, thinking of a bunch of times he'd made some verbal barb equating Nathan's state of not being able to feel anything to not really being alive. "Sorry, buddy."

"I'm sure it's not like that," Audrey said, hard. "And I'm sure we can fix this, just like last time." She looked over at the truck. "Can you take four of them? They're just kids. I've got the taser now..." She also had Duke's shotgun, had had to take it so that he could carry Nathan. But stating that he was ready to kill someone to protect her had been easier as an abstract; not quite the same faced with a bunch of transformed teenagers. Or maybe associating with her had brought him closer back to his normal self since he'd declared that.

"Screw the truck," Duke said, not wanting to shoot them, but not wanting to fight them either. "I'll pick it up when this is all over. Let's just hotwire that sedan." He pointed to the nearest parked car.

She shot him a crooked smile. "Break the law, Duke? I could arrest you for that."

"My misbegotten youth," he fielded. "You and Nathan can arrest me and read me my rights when this is all over." That was always a fun game. Nathan in particular got really into it. Duke still remembered with glee Nathan's expression when he'd admitted the sexual kick he'd gotten from all those times Nate had dragged him to the station in cuffs in the past. It had been a beautiful picture. He wished he could've snapped it, framed it and hung it on the wall.

"Uh-oh." Audrey stood, balancing her stance and levelling her taser. The vampire youths had already seen them and were on their way over. "So much for that plan."

Duke lay Nathan down on the steps next to where Audrey had left her roll of police tape, making sure Nathan's head was cradled and he wasn't going to roll off. Then Duke straightened and moved to stand in front of Audrey, accepting his shotgun back from her. "You boys want something? Got no merchandise on me today."

Oh, _shit_. Their eyes were looking past him to Audrey, and their noses were sniffing, their facing craning, like they were more animals than men. They weren't interested in him or their vague past acquaintance. Duke had felt that pull himself, and he _knew_ they weren't going to be able to talk the group out of this.

Decision made, he discharged the shotgun wide of the nearest, catching the one behind him in the halo of the fire, with hopefully enough damage to slow it down. Then he swung the weapon back in his arm as he moved to meet the lunge of the one who'd been too close to point-blank for comfort. Duke grabbed him by the neck and curled the hand holding the shotgun around under his ass, ready to snap him in two as he drove upward with his knee... Audrey's shrill cry was a timely reminder. Jesus! Even when he was deliberately calculating, his physical instincts wanted to go in for the kill. He softened the blow and cast the kid aside still definitely groaning.

The next one, with the pellet damage, had claws and dealt Duke a slice of all five of them right down from his exposed collar, tearing through the front of his shirt before he had time to do more than flinch back. Getting shot had definitely pissed him off. The other two junkie vampires were going straight for Audrey. Duke heard the crackle and smelled the ozone as she used the taser. She wouldn't be able to get the weapon back and primed again in time for the second...

Immaterial, as it turned out when, beyond the initial jolt, the shock seemed to have less effect on the bloodsucking undead than on _people_.

The pain of the cuts annoyed Duke and he dealt several swift blows to the vamp-boy's face, stomach and groin in retaliation. He curled his foot around the kid's ankle and shoved him hard backwards. There was enough force in the push that the kid slid on his ass halfway across the road. Duke blinked for a moment. He hadn't expected that.

Audrey's cry demanded his attention, and he spun around to start on her assailants. They were pawing at her, the first with the prongs of the taser still in him, and even still flickering with electricity, for all the difference it made. They had her pinned between them, and Duke saw them take a few desperate hits from her that from him would have made an impression. Audrey's human strength they absorbed like it was nothing.

One of them caught Audrey's hand and waist and the other pulled at her hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat.

Duke wasn't particularly thinking about not killing when he drove his fist into the kid's face. That one fell and didn't get up... but the two behind him he'd thought he'd dealt with were making enough noise to tell him they were going to be pests again. Never mind. He ignored them while he separated the remaining vampire from Audrey. The little huff of pain she gave as he pushed her aside warned him that increased strength could be a danger to his friends, too. Even if he'd bruised her, she set about retrieving her taser.

Duke swung the guy who'd been attacking Audrey around with the intention to hurl him into his oncoming friends, and was stopped short as unexpected _agony_ punched him through the gut.

Audrey let out a gasp and a horrified, " _No!"_

Duke dropped the guy -- he was going to drop him anyway, a bunch of the muscles he was using to stretch his arms to hold him up like that had just been _severely_ compromised -- but managed with a last-ditch effort to score at at least one of his fellow junkie-vamps, though that was almost entirely by accident, because all he'd been trying to do was avoid hitting the metal pole that was poking about three feet of its length from the front of his belly and presumably at least some behind him, too.

He was left staggering, facing a conundrum. His legs wanted him to fall. He _couldn't_ fall -- couldn't even risk going to his knees and jarring the pole against the ground... He was peripherally aware of movement from Audrey and a gunshot ringing out as she shot the last guy in the foot. Duke gripped his hand to the point where the _fucking street furniture_ was embedded in his torso, trying to hold it steady, and managed to lurch the dozen or so steps necessary to take him to the side of a (much more solid, still upstanding) lamp post, which he clung to. He felt around behind him for an exit point... Definitely protruding from his back, as well. But a shorter length: he could reach the end with his fingers. He leaned his forehead into the lamp post and swore, and swore, and _swore_.

He heard a click as Audrey cuffed together the two guys still in a messy pile. Her voice spoke harshly, "If you fucking move, I will shoot you in the _other_ one," and then her feet approached Duke.

"Duke..." she said, sad and soft and hoarse. "Are you..." ... _All right?_ would have been a stupid thing to ask. She left it at that.

"This," Duke grit, through the pain, trying to think, trying to remember the _rules_. "This probably isn't going to kill me as a vampire. Right?" Stake through the heart... It wasn't a stake and it was too low to be anywhere near his heart.

"No," Audrey breathed. "No, it shouldn't." Audrey knew the rules, too. But there was only a little, sorry note of relief in her voice, because this Trouble, this Trouble they had to _end_...

"Oh, God, I'm so fucked," Duke groaned, clutching his fingers to the lamp post, abrading them to the point of grazes with the force of his touch.

"Wait." Audrey reached out and grabbed his hand. She pulled it from the post, spreading his fingers out, tips facing upwards. He turned his head so he could watch her directly, rather than out of his muddy peripheral vision. "Look, Duke..."

The small wounds in his fingers healed up sluggishly. They had to watch for a minute to get any impression of it, and it'd take about fifteen before they'd be completely gone, but they _did_ heal.

"You're a vampire," Audrey said. "You _regenerate_. That means we need to get that thing _out_."

"No!" Duke's automatic reaction was horror. He couldn't imagine moving again, even the smallest amount that would shift the pole. It was a _no parking_ sign, of all things, torn up from one of the bays outside the police station that were used for police cars... like the one in which he'd parked his truck, and regularly parked his truck, because hey, he was boning two cops who could deal with stuff like that. It was like his bad karma. It was nearly two inches thick, hollow inside, and he absolutely could not frame the concept of _pulling it out_. "It's not going to make a difference," he said, with difficulty. _Talking_ shifted its solid mass against his abdomen. "It's a huge wound. This thing is... it's hollow... there's gonna be bits _scraped out_." He wanted to throw up. That would definitely hurt. Could vampires throw up? "There's no way it regenerates enough in time. Not unless it takes something like a week to fix this Trouble. I'm a dead man."

"What about the tattoo?" she shot back at him.

"Last sight, remember?" He groaned. "Not necessarily the killer. It's probably gonna be Nathan reaching for me as he's all back among the living and I'm bleeding what's left of my guts out."

"Bullshit!" Audrey hissed. She grabbed the pole, the three-foot length of it in front of him with the bizarre _no parking_ plaque on the end of it. Duke didn't have the voice to scream. "You are not going to die..." Her eyes changed with wary anxiety, with burgeoning hope. "I know how these things work. I'm not going to let you die. But I have to take this _out_ so we can heal that wound."

She yanked on the pole. This time, Duke did scream.

He clung to the lamp post and considered begging her, but he really didn't have the breath, and he doubted, at this stage, that she would even listen.

She hadn't moved the sign by much and it took two more tries before she hauled it clear. She was trying to put as much force as she could into the tugs, to pull it out smoothly, and she was sweating by the time she finally dragged it free. The sensation as it came loose and the hole in Duke's body sort of collapsed in on itself was particularly horrible. Audrey flung the post aside with a clang. Duke grunted, nothing left in him to manage more, and slid down to his knees. It smelled like dog at the base of the lamp post, sharp and unpleasant, but he couldn't make himself move until Audrey caught at his shoulders. "Come on..." She got him back to the steps, next to Nathan, hauling him to lie up the steps too, so he was almost sitting upright at Nathan's side.

There was some blood on his torso, and what at least looked like a lot of blood on Audrey's hands, but the wound wasn't gushing the way he'd have expected. _Vampire_ , Duke thought. _Undead. No pulse, no blood flow, nothing to pump the blood out of that hole._ That was something, at least.

"I know what you need," Audrey was saying. But Audrey was kind of floating, and seemed both very close and very far away. Duke felt his head spinning... Could he pass out? Spike and Angel had used to, he rather thought, then tried to remember other less crap fictional vampires. Dracula had never fainted. "Duke, stay with me. I have what you want." She was drawing a knife. It was his own knife, his father's... the one he'd taken to carrying around since he learned of his blood Trouble, even though he was determined not to use his blood Trouble... Just his way of hitting irony hard. She stuck the point of it into her own arm and flicked it hard out, creating a fast-bleeding little gouge. "This is what you need, Duke, isn't it? What you've been after since we found each other today..."

She hovered the blood in front of his face and Duke made a little noise of denial, jerking his head away. He'd been trying so hard _not to_...

The blood followed him. Audrey pushed her arm against his mouth, and as soon as the _taste_ hit his tongue, there was nothing he could do to fight against it any longer. He latched on and greedily sucked her in. After the first energising, glorious mouthful slid down his throat, he had the strength to raise his hands and grip her arm, pulling it to him. He heard a discomforted noise from her, but it didn't really register. Her blood was amazing. Duke was a connoisseur of fine food and fine wines, but he'd never tasted anything so good as this. He never wanted it to stop.

A jolt shook him. His eyes flew wide, though his teeth and hands didn't quite relax their grip. Audrey's face was directly above him now, very close. The taser was in her hand and the electrodes sunk into his breast. Her legs straddled his thighs. Her hair hung over him. Her face was pale, and shining with a sheen of sweat. She looked like she did in sex, except for the pallor.

"Duke..." _Zzap_! "Let _go_... You've had enough!"

Realisation landed on him like a truck. He opened his jaw wide and his arms flew clear, releasing her. His abdomen still hurt, though it was far dulled from before. The taste still filled his mouth, but it was mingled with guilt. Had he taken too much...? His mind was clearer now. How much blood had he stolen, that she needed for herself?

"I'm sorry..." he stuttered. "So sorry.. Audrey... Audrey, are you all right?"

She swung up and off him, staggering and catching herself. But she _did_ catch herself, and she turned back to him. "I'm all right. We're... I hope we're _both_ all right. Open your shirt."

Duke sat up, wincing as that moved the damaged tissues of his stomach, and fumbled clumsily at buttons, pulling his shirt open. Audrey dropped carefully back to one knee to reach in, to dab a little blood clear with her sleeve. There was a puckered wound in kind of a lazy star shape, a central point with reddish lines spiking off, but it was closed and it looked a week old or more. Audrey let her breath out in a long, slow, relieved sigh. "I think we might have done enough. But we'll look at it later and maybe we can try again if this hasn't improved further, before everything... turns back."

Duke managed to crook a grin at her, of sorts, still half shocked and his mind racing with thoughts of guilt. "We shouldn't..." But he didn't have any intention to die, either, so he didn't push the thought.

He gathered his feet under him to get up, and his body let him, albeit unsteadily. He found himself clinging to Audrey's shoulder, and tried to transfer that to the low wall, knowing she was almost as unsteady. "That was... that was something else," he said, meeting her gaze with a little bit of a cringe.

To his surprise, she flushed. At least her body had blood enough left in it for that. "Umm... We should..." She pointed at Nathan, and looked back at the truck. Duke, suspicious, sniffed the air and caught behind all the blood the scent of sexual arousal. God, she must be so wet, right now, if he could scent it through the _blood_. He wanted to kiss her, to touch her... but in the circumstances, that was a _bad idea_. "I'll get the truck."

Duke fumbled his keys across to her and made a point of trying to reassert control over himself while she walked away. No doubt she was using the opportunity apart to do the same.

But it seemed to him, as he had chance to steady and take stock, that he _was_ more in control now. Maybe it was having her Trouble-resistant blood inside him, helping him along... Though he winced for another reason, at that thought: dumb luck it hadn't gone the other way, and made him all the way normal and all the way dead.

He was seriously going to get some mileage out of Audrey's vampire fetish once they were all back to normal. He wondered what Nathan would make of it...

Nathan.

Duke sighed, bent down and gathered Nathan up again. It wasn't so easy as before, but he was still able to lift him up, and lay him across the back seat when Audrey brought the truck closer.

"He _has_ to survive this," he commented. "For no other reason than we absolutely need to roleplay those two dudes from _Twilight_ or _Buffy_ and reveal your secret shame."

Audrey's face coloured again and she shot back, "Which one's the broody one and which one's the evil one? Oh, wait."

Duke was... not so okay with this as he was shamblingly -- very shamblingly -- trying to project. He shut the back door, Nathan safely inside. As he rounded the truck, he noticed something, and he was drawn back to the lamp post he'd been leaning on earlier.

It wasn't his own bloody handprints daubed all over it which had drawn his attention.

"...Audrey?" She was distracted by kicking the handcuffed vampires back into submission. "This is, uh, interesting." Duke pointed to what was attached to the lamp post.

She fell in at his side and stared at it with him. "I've seen that poster somewhere before."

 _MOVIE NIGHT_ , it read. 14 _TH OCTOBER. AN EVENING OF VINTAGE AND MODERN CHILLS._ Fuzzy images of corny vampires, witches and spectral ghouls glared out from the poster's sides. It was advertising for the amateur movie theatre at the high school.

"There's a copy of it up in the _Gull_ ," Duke said, gruffly. "And I remember having a _long_ conversation with the guy who asked to put it there."

***

Annalise Hammond had been fighting cancer for two years, but now a fluff of hair was starting to reclaim her scalp, and along with her slow gain of a little more weight, had started to return her to a semblance of her former self. It seemed deeply unfair that this Trouble had decided to cast her among the deceased after her hard-won battles. "But it _is_ a Trouble," Nathan said to her, as positively as to all the rest, "and we're going to fix it."

He was noticing a pattern, though, with the people they picked up. The downtrodden and faded and just plain tired, this Trouble had claimed for ghosts. He had to assume that it was on account of his own Trouble that _he_ belonged in that group.

They'd acquired nearly a dozen on their way down Main Street. For the most part, they were like Baylen, scared and useless and even less functional now they'd been snatched from life without warning and stuck in this state, in an altered and terrifying version of their hometown, unable to communicate with anyone else... not that they would want to, because all of their families, those of them who had families, were _monsters_. They clung to Nathan's little group when he found them. There were some surprises. Duke's permanently incoherent barfly John MacDee had run all the way from the Grey Gull back into town, desperate to investigate what the hell had happened, desperately sober for the first time in years.

Annalise Hammond came hand-in-hand with a non-verbal, ghostly child. "I found her wandering at the hospital. There were enough horrible sights there. So I brought her away from them." Annalise's eyes were hard.

The more people joined them, the more pressured Nathan felt. His original plan had been to head more or less toward the _Gull_ , but with this many in tow, they would certainly question that choice. To go to Duke's bar rather than stay central and investigate the power bases of the town would seem crazy to them. Nathan had thought Audrey would have gone to Duke if she'd seen him die. John MacDee had confirmed Duke had been there, but hadn't seen Audrey.

If Audrey had gone to Duke, then Duke... Nathan had to believe he'd back her up. Audrey would be Trouble-proof enough to bring him around from whatever he'd been transformed into. Duke would be strong enough not to hurt Audrey, whatever he'd become. Nathan needed to leave them to it and look after these people. He could see how much they needed it. It was the right thing to do.

It didn't sit easy with him, all the same. Audrey was important to the town, too, but he couldn't explain that without sounding insane. They couldn't drive, or even sit in a car, and he _couldn't_ drag these people all the way out to the _Gull_ on foot. So he opted to approach the _Herald_ office instead. Maybe they could get some information from Vince and Dave, or at least from their computers.

Max Hansen, for the moment, seemed content to follow Nathan's lead and smirk condescendingly every so often. Nathan was afraid to look too deep at what drove Max to attach himself to the group -- no, to _Nathan_ , for it was clearly not with the rest of these people that Max's interests lay. Awkward, too, so very much so, to be trying to take charge of so many when he knew Max held power over him that he might decide to exercise at any time. If he did, then everyone would see how ineffective their Chief of Police really was in this state... just the same as any of them.

They were heading off Main Street down to where the _Herald_ offices lay when a teasing wolf whistle called Nathan's attention to the left. He stopped abruptly. Annalise bumped his arm and exclaimed in surprise. Leaning in the shadows of the big old Rowan tree, which had been lightning struck a few years back but still struggled to leaf in the summer, there stood another figure Nathan recognised already belonged among the dead.

"Hello, lover boy." Evidence Ryan's pretty face stretched in a wide grin, the kind of grin that, from their admittedly short and skewed acquaintance, seemed to be her speciality. In that acquaintance, she also seemed to specialise in calling him by a variety of names which, on her lips, subtly seemed to imply some insult stemming from the nature of his relationship with Duke. "Imagine that. Nathan Wuornos, joining the other side quite this soon." Her voice was a purr. Her arms were folded, her body language closed. Her figure gleamed faintly against the shadows of the tree.

"This is a Trouble," Nathan said. His voice was getting hoarse from saying it. "I'm not dead." Hard glances were being exchanged between Max and Evi.

"You don't say. If this many people dying produced spooks all the time, the overcrowding would be unbearable." She pushed off from the tree and strutted out into the street to join the group. Nathan's eyes zeroed in on the small movements of the nearest branch. It seemed Evi, like Max, could affect the world around her. Were Nathan and the others so powerless in this state because it was a Trouble, or because they were new?

"You..." Nathan ran his eyes up and down her, closer up. He felt like he should say something. She had died as the result of a siege in his own police station. He had failed to save her. "You look well." That was probably a ridiculous thing to say, though she inarguably did look better than the last time he'd seen her alive. He rallied as far as, "I'm sorry you died."

She tipped a shoulder. "No use crying over spilled milk. I guess you and Officer Blondie won. Won Duke, won everything."

Nathan was very conscious of all the spectators this conversation had, and Max most of all. He grit his teeth. "Not because you died. And we wouldn't have wanted that."

When she'd come to town, Evi had been amused and belittling of their newly-forged relationship. Duke in a three-way was apparently nothing new, but Duke seriously trying to forge a life that way, treating it as a steady relationship, _was_... and was a matter of considerable mirth for Duke's wife. Evi had not taken it seriously; had tried everything to force a wedge between them. Since neither Nathan nor Audrey had previously known Duke was _married_ , her existence alone was already a severe dent. After her death, having Duke's guilt to contend with had probably been the thing that came closest to breaking them apart. But they had weathered that, and it was all in the past.

They had new problems, now, of course.

Evi pulled a face at Nathan. "Of course not, Hero Type. Wouldn't be fitting. Then again, the things you do with your boyfriend and Blondie probably don't fit into any traditional role, either."

There was a distinct choking sound from Max. Nathan growled, "Can we please not talk about this when we have a crisis to deal with? We're going to the Teagues -- the newspaper -- to try find out some information. If you want to join us and help, then help. If you don't--" He shot her a look that was angry and pointed.

Oho, said her returned raised eyebrow. Maybe he'd given too much away.

She'd already done enough. Max's hauled Nathan around by the back of his jacket. "You seriously telling me a son of mine takes it up the ass from Duke Crocker?"

" _No_ , you--" Nathan launched off, furious and not entirely true, but protesting with details of what they _actually_ did was decidedly too much information in front of all these people. Besides which -- it shouldn't matter. He had nothing to damn well prove to that attitude. He told himself it, fiercely, and felt fiercely humiliated anyway. "Get off me, damn it! My personal life isn't at issue here! We need to get the town back to normal!" He shoved Max back.

Evi's brows had gone up with the exchange. She actually looked a little caught off-guard. "Sorry to stir. I mean, I'm dead and all, but no hard feelings." She gestured open-palmed.

No, it was just what she did every time she opened her mouth, Nathan thought furiously. Although he seriously doubted she hadn't got a kick out of the reaction just then. He'd been party to taking Duke from her and in life, she'd made no secret of how she resented that. Made no secret of _their_ secrets, either, one of the reasons not everyone in his little audience was reacting to the revelation with surprise. Perhaps, though, there was a hint of real apology in her face as she looked back from him to Max, her nose and brow crinkling in thought. She hadn't known Max was his father.

"Goddamn, this just gets better. What the hell kind of screw-up job did Garland do?" Max said, snapping Nathan's attention back to him. The feeling of being surrounded by enemies while in front of an audience, with all his hangups and anxieties subject to discussion, was terrifying. He was supposed to be a public figure, a leader... He had people to take care of. He needed their respect to do it. He was supposed to be in control, but Max Hansen's presence was making it hard to focus on anything at all. Evi's presence was, as usual, stirring everything in the worst way.

But perhaps if Max wouldn't cooperate with him, then Evi would. There were things he _needed_ to know. Nathan tried to ignore Max and turned back to her, "Evi... You've been doing this... ghost thing... for a while. We could use your help." It did hurt a little to admit it.

"Obviously." A smile played around her lips. Nathan started walking, gesturing for the group to move ahead, and she fell in at his side, prompting a huff of either frustration or exaggerated patience from Max, who also kept deliberately apart from the rest, eyes fixed on Evi and Nathan. "The newspaper, huh? Why is it that those two old geezers have a stake in everything that goes on in this town, anyway?"

"Think they're just calling dibs by longevity," Nathan murmured. "Evi, I need to--" He didn't really have the time for idle conversation.

"Mhm," Evi said over him, brightly. "Those two are relics from at least the Civil War, huh?" She stretched, or mimed stretching, reaching her arms up above her head and then bringing them down more widely. From his peripheral vision, Nathan knew she'd practically laid an arm over his shoulder.

She'd made moves on him before, but what good would it do to try compromise him to use as a lever against Duke now? he wondered, shoulders stiffening at the unwanted touch even if he _couldn't_ feel it. She was dead, and presumably Duke couldn't see her any more than Nathan had been able to detect Max. He'd certainly never admitted to Nathan that his dead wife was still hanging around. Nathan rolled his shoulders awkwardly and prepared to speed up his steps and shrug loose the arm still curled around him.

Max gave a growl and took a step towards them.

Evi's hand did something, moving swiftly, and Nathan found himself staggering. He heard an angry cry from Max, and _almost-felt_... something like a giving way, a parting. Since he'd been in this state, everything had seemed... blocked, reduced, _stifled_. He suddenly felt _freed_. Less heavy, less hampered.

Max had been doing _just what_?

Memory slammed into Nathan before he could really shape that thought and take it anywhere. Surging, incoherent images and feelings dumped themselves into his brain. Nathan fell to one knee and shut his eyes, but it didn't help. The confusion continued behind his tight-shut lids.

 _Huddling scared... A big hand looming closer to take up all his world... The repeated sounds of hard hands thumping into softer, pliable matter... Fear and awfulness and mixed with it all, something else, a thing he barely remembered these days and didn't recall ever experiencing in such stark, overwhelming intensity... Pain,_ pain, PAIN _._

The images steadied just enough to catch a glimpse of the face behind the blows.

"You beat me?" Nathan asked, his voice scraping. He stared up at Max, who'd rounded on the now very nervous Evi, but Nathan's accusation drew his attention back. "I must have been, what? Six years old? Younger?" He'd been with Garland after that, hadn't he? He remembered, he was sure, that it had been Garland going crazy after the sledding incident, especially when he discovered that it had been Duke who helped Nathan back to town. "What possible reason could you have--?"

Nathan's voice failed him entirely. His childhood was indistinct before his teenage years, except for a very few incidents that stood out with crystal clarity. Like Duke and the tacks. Why would he remember that, which looked so unimportant now, and yet not remember being beaten -- badly, and from what he'd glimpsed, it hadn't been a one-off -- when he was six years old? When he'd _felt_ those beatings? But Duke had always claimed to have memories missing from around that time. Maybe whatever Trouble had hit Duke had hit him worse.

"Gun!" Evi blurted, jolting him out of his stupor as she backed away from Max, who'd turned away again in Nathan's distraction.

"You _bitch_!" Max snarled. "Nothing to do with you, what goes on between me and mine."

Evi's arms were held out to ward Max off. " _Wuornos_ , damn it!"

Gun...? Sluggishly, Nathan remembered he still had the ghost-version of his service pistol at his hip. He reached behind him and drew it. His finger slipped on the trigger, numb and badly controlled by his shaking hands... Should ghosts _shake_? The ethereal bullet he accidentally loosed cut a narrow line through Max's ethereal substance just below his knee. Nathan considered it lucky it only caused that minimal damage to Max and didn't hit anyone else.

"Boys need discipline," Max growled, and Nathan realised that he was answering him. "Make you a man. Never did me any harm. Now I've seen what kind of a job Garland's done, pretty clear he didn't do the same."

Nathan stared at him.

Evi urged, "You can fight him now."

"What _happened_?" Nathan asked. There were enough other things to focus on, enough distractions, new memories, new information, new horrors, but _this_ , he didn't understand.

"Don't you point that gun at your old man," Max said, taking a step closer. His leg leaked a little substance off into the air with the movement, but it was a minor inconvenience. "Here, you give it to me, boy."

Those words reverberated in Nathan's head. He'd heard them before. He'd been here before, gun in hand, staring up at Max from this same height... But he hadn't been on his knees, then, and the hand coming toward him had looked bigger. His own hand looked bigger on the gun, didn't match the memory, where he'd had to use both hands to hold it. There'd been someone behind him, someone hurt... _Mother_... He hadn't had the strength to protect her, though if his new-returned memory served, it had been he who'd taken the rest of the beating afterward, back then.

The memories were his but Nathan felt divorced from them. The physical sensations in them might be a part of it, but so might the fact he'd lived so long believing in another life, a happy early childhood, not even remembering Max at all.

Maybe he should thank Garland for keeping his secrets to the grave.

It was pretty easy to say, "You've got to be fucking kidding me. Why the hell would I do that?" and drag himself to his feet, once the initial shock had rolled past him. He pointed the gun and his hands were steady enough, this time. "I don't know what you were doing to me then, that she stopped--" He jerked his head at Evi. "But it's pretty clear that nothing's changed. Garland thought you were poison. He never told me so. Never told me a damn thing. But it's obvious from his files. Everything I'm looking at now tells me he was right."

Nathan narrowed his eyes at his biological father. Genetics didn't matter that much, did they? Choice was important, too. "You're going to walk away," he told Max. "Leave me and these people alone."

Max laughed, the sound raucous and mocking. "You don't have the balls to do that. First shot was an accident. I saw that."

 _Damn_. Touching Max felt like it might leave a stain, and was a risky act, since Max seemed to have been drawing... something... off of him, before now, but Nathan wasn't ready to find out what effect a more disabling shot had on someone who was already dead -- not yet. He crooked his hand back with the gun, cocking the trigger, keeping it aimed but out of reach as he extended his other hand and used it to shove Max in the chest, hard as he could. "I said _get out_." He'd forgotten for a few minutes that he had an audience, but noticed again now that they were watching with saucer-wide eyes.

"Yeah, fuck off," chimed in John MacDee, stomping to the fore of the group. "Sounds like you're a worse damn father than I am, and I tell you, that takes a lot of doing." The rest of them shifted around him, turning glares Max's way. Even the ones who were miserable about living and even more miserable about dying found they had disdain to muster for Max. The force of the group in sync might have had its own fazing effect. Max fell back another step.

"Piss off, jerkoff," said Evi. "You know you don't get to do that shit around here. The Haven Dead Committee will have your head."

With a last savage look at Nathan, Max staggered back and lunged away. he seemed to blink out, then he was more distant, fading, vanishing on the air.

Evi let out a long sigh of relief. "He's like a force of nature. And _you_... you didn't help that." She swung around on Nathan. "Letting him leech that much off you!"

"I didn't--" Nathan was left, gaping, with the gun still raised in his hand. "I don't even know what you just did, I don't know what _he_ was doing, and I won't know unless someone explains." His cluster of newly-dead townsfolk looked just as clueless. Had Evi even done this to help him, or just to prove a point, to hang something over him? She'd always seemed to make much of the fact that she didn't do anything for nothing.

He took a breath. Somehow his body seemed to demand it, even though so far as he could tell, his body consisted of transparent almost-nothing, and certainly was not drawing breath. Habit, perhaps. He decided he might not trust Evi, but she had helped him get rid of Max, and Max definitely hadn't been benign. Worse than the dangerous nuisance Nathan had been thinking of him as. "I... felt... something, when you reached behind me. That's all I know."

"Okay." She relented. "He was leeching energy from you, like a parasite. The worst ones, the scary ones, are usually family members." Her face softened further, perhaps going over what she'd heard. "You can leech off the living fairly safely, and they'll barely notice, but it's worse when it's the dead. I've seen people end up as wisps in a matter of months. Usually it takes centuries for a ghost to badly fade."

Nathan heard, _You can leech off the living_ , and shuddered inwardly. Had Max been doing that to him? The bastard had been haunting the police station offices for months... and apparently had a direct line into buried parts of Nathan's psyche.

"He must have had his hooks deep into you," Evi said, watching him closely. She pulled a face. "I'd never give anyone that kind of hold over me."

"I didn't--" Nathan started again, sourly. He gave up and sighed. "I think he got them in early." He shook his head. "I don't even remember him back then, but... some of it returned just now." Automatically, he closed his lips. He didn't want to talk about it, and he hadn't time to think about it -- they'd wasted enough time already. He forced his expression level again, or hoped he had. "I don't know why you did help, but whatever you did, I... Thanks. Only stay, though, if you mean to keep helping. Max was disruptive. I'm not swapping him for another disruption."

She tipped a shoulder. "I cut the cord, for what it's worth. Takes a practised eye to see it, so I get why none of these would. You should have more energy now. Be able to do more, once you've time to regroup. And it's nothing, by the by, Hero Type... I just don't like parasites." There was still sarcasm in her tone, but she didn't leave.

Nathan had never had much intimations of understanding or compassion before from Duke's wife, but he supposed it possible he hadn't been best placed to witness a softer side of her. He did see those things, for a moment, as she looked at him and her face twisted. She said, "I guess some things we could live without remembering,"

Nathan shook himself. None of this was conducive to the task at hand. "Okay--" He turned around to the rest of them, holstering his gun. It was difficult to force his fingers to unclench from the handle. "The newspaper offices. The plan hasn't changed, though we'll have to keep a lookout for Max -- he knows we intended to go there. I don't know if Vince and Dave will be able to help us. If they can't, we'll have to help ourselves." If Max had been... stealing energy from him somehow, then he hoped his earlier failures to interact with the world didn't mean anything. Had he braced himself against the ground when he'd shoved Max away? He wasn't sure. He looked at Evi, slightly concerned about coming to her as any kind of petitioner for favours. "You'll teach us how to do that? Or help us, if we can't?"

"Great." She rolled her eyes back at him. "Now I'm supposed to be _teaching_ you? Basic Haunting For Dummies. How to Shake Your Ghostly Ass 101. If _you_ hadn't stolen my husband, I wouldn't have gone to those crazy lengths to get him back, and _I_ wouldn't be dead, Mr Self-Righteous Cop."

Nathan rolled his eyes. They knew Evi had already been working for the Rev when she'd come to town.

"And just so you know, I still don't _like_ cops," she added, belligerently.

Nathan gave a bark of helpless laughter. "Duke's been telling me that for years." In fact, the last time he'd said it had been in bed, that morning, and Nathan wasn't going to disclose the circumstances in front of this crowd, not for anything.

***

Audrey had had enough of the High School after what Duke had dubbed 'the sex doll Trouble' and herself and Nathan had dubbed 'please don't call it that' a few weeks back. A bunch of particular Asshole variety of students had discovered one of their number could generate mindless clones of faculty and fellow students alike. It had actually been pretty grim. Especially annoying, she'd discovered her immunity didn't extend to some jerkass deciding to add a cop to their clone harem.

Honestly, she'd been tempted to step back and let the Chief of Police and the criminal of dubious morality at her shoulders pound the kids to paste. It had been hard to tell which, between Nathan and Duke, was more in danger of murdering a teenage pervert. As little as she'd felt like doing so, Audrey had had to intervene, in the end.

But she'd still indulged herself in watching plenty of the _panic_ and _fear_ first.

"Thank God Haven doesn't have a university," she said to Duke as they walked again down the high school halls. "I don't think I could cope with Troubles plus frat boys."

Duke shuddered. "Saved by our lack of Higher Learning. There's a lesson in that..."

"Says the man who speaks three whole other languages to my 'give me a drink' in Spanish," Audrey retorted.

"I live in the world. Big difference."

She thought Duke was doing better, now. Audrey didn't feel quite the same urge to have eyes on him at all times. Perhaps that was kind of weird, when he'd now actually had a taste of her. But perhaps her blood had helped clear his mind and make him more himself.

She shuddered at the thought of the injury. Duke was holding himself slightly tenderly when he moved, but gave no sign of being in any great pain, though his agony before had terrified her. Pulling that pole out of him must have hurt unimaginably. If that repair didn't hold when everyone switched back... She was gathering a list of all the things she did not want to see happen to her lovers ever again. She had seen _both_ of them die far too many times now.

Immunity was its own kind of burden.

And, as ever, responsibility.

There were a lot of copies of the poster up around the school buildings. Someone had already added direction signs, arrows taped onto doors and walls beneath the posters. The amateur movie theatre was in a lecture hall at the back of the science labs.

It was too much to hope that there was anyone there. The movie screenings weren't scheduled until the evening, and it was anyone's guess if the show would still run, now this Trouble had kicked off, if it _was_ the source of the Trouble.

What _was_ there already was more promotional material and handouts, with extra information about the movies being shown. The modern vampire movie was standard teenage fare, and might have been where Duke's particular archetype came from. There was a werewolf movie she hadn't seen but that made Duke snicker and say, "Weirwilfs," in a particular weird voice, and another one said it was about witches. Duke pointed to the list and said, "I remember that movie. Everyone's running around as a ghost at the end. None of this list are exactly classics."

"Teenagers," Audrey said. "You were expecting taste?"

"Not really." Duke rubbed the pad of his thumb over his teeth and his contemplative stare... she wondered if it was starting to develop that hungry, needy look again. He'd had enough of her blood to make her woozy, and they'd stopped to raid a gas station store for candy on the way here. But Audrey knew she wasn't yet ready to spare any more blood. Not and still be functional enough to pursue this case afterward. She'd give him more -- she _would not_ risk having him die if there was anything she could do to prevent it -- but he was going to have to wait.

"Hang in there," she said to him.

She tried not to dwell on the tingles through her body, the flutter in her belly and lower, when she thought about that feeding. Part of her wanted more. That had only been a bite on the _wrist_... If she let him bite her neck...

 _Too many trashy vampire novels, damn it,_ she thought furiously at herself. _Calm down, girl!_

"Do we have to come back at 6pm?" Duke asked, a hint of desperation in the question.

It was not so many hours, now, but Audrey felt the tension between them at the prospect of this stretching out so long. Enough time to-- "No," she said quickly, reminding herself that indulging in this... fetish... had potentially disastrous consequences. "We don't even know if he'll be here later. There must be something else we can do to find where that kid is. Maybe you don't know where he lives, but the whole staff and security of this place just dropped out of commission. I say we go dig out his school record and track him down... and hope he hasn't been affected by his own Trouble."

"Weeell," Duke wheedled, pulling a face. "Um, I'm guessing at least fifty percent of the name 'Spooky Johnson' is not what's on his birth certificate."

"There can't be an impossible number of 'Johnsons' in the school, and they should have pictures in the records. I'm sure that between you and me -- okay, mostly you -- cracking their computer records system won't be too big a problem." She picked up the poster, scouring it again with her eyes for a clue that might help them out, preferably in the form of an 'organised by' credit in a corner somewhere. Examining the smaller print gave her nothing, though, until she looked at the top. Then she saw something that she hadn't thought to put together before, with everything else that had been going on. "No way."

"No way what?" Duke looked up from his own study of the monochrome-printed schedule.

"This..." Audrey touched the top right of the poster. The artwork had made it look like deep slashes had been scored through the paper by the claws of some beast. Two claw marks seemed aesthetically lacking, though. Surely better to have a convincing handful: three, or four. But that was sort of the point, because this... "It's not arbitrary claw slashes, is it? This is supposed to be the numeral _two_." She blinked up at Duke. "Troubles have been in this town a while, this time around. Do you think this could have happened here _before?"_

***


	3. Chapter 3

PART 3

Their numbers were trimmed on the way to the _Herald_ office when John MacDee discovered mid-step that he couldn't proceed any further, like he'd run up against an invisible wall. "You're the guy that came up from the _Gull_?" Evi said, with a small, grim nod. "Must've hit your limit. Not bad going... Most of us are tied within a given distance of where we died." 

The old barfly swore and stomped about behind his invisible line. "Well, shit. I guess I'll hover around here twiddling my thumbs while you all go do your thing." He looked disgruntled. You wouldn't have thought he'd not done a day of work in three years.

At the _Herald_ , Nathan didn't expect his research team of waifs and strays to strike gold fast. The Teagues didn't have all their old files on the computers yet, and it was going to take more years than the two old pressmen had left in them to do that. It meant the computer search would be hit and miss. He got the others started at the desks searching the paper archives while he and Evi tackled the computer, which was apparently the tricky part for those of ghostly status.

Occasionally Evi would go across to one of the others when they waved a hand to signal, and blow or flick the paper they were working from over onto the next page. 

Big, lumbering ogre!Vince crossed the room a few times to stare at the papers moving on their own, and Dave, little goblin Dave who it seemed could still talk, gibbered at his brother, "We've got goddamn poltergeists in here now, Vince, that's what this is! It's your fault! You're the one who was so hot to be dicking about with the Ouija Board last Christmas party. Everyone knows you play with a Ouija Board, you get poltergeists. Least if the infestation was rats we could eat 'em!"

Nathan kept trying to touch things, but except for the one time he'd done it accidentally in the grip of his fury, he couldn't make it work, much to his frustration. "It's probably gonna take time to build up your energy reserves again," Evi said, eying him dubiously. "If this is a temporary state, maybe that's time you won't have. He must have leeched a lot out of you. Them--" she waved her hand at the others. "They never had much to start with, but you, you were young -- ish -- and strong, healthy and happy, and gettin' some on a regular basis." Nathan scowled at her. "You should have the mojo to spare."

Damn Max, Nathan thought, fuming. Haven needed help, _Audrey_ was out there somewhere needing his help, and thanks to Max Hansen's interference, he was stuck intangible and _useless_. He closed his eyes on the swell of rage and the other memories it stirred up and carried along with it. At least he understood, now, he reflected wryly, that flash image he'd had from Jackie, before he closed his eyes to hide from it. That fist coming toward him... He'd not understood at the time, all out of context, either what it was or why it had provoked such an intense fear reaction. It had seemed like a giant... But it had only been that _he_ had been so very small, back when that fear had lodged in his brain. Back when _Max_ and _Max's temper_ had become his worst fear.

Who beat a child that young? It wasn't a question a police officer should ask. He'd seen these things... but he supposed, that _was_ different from understanding it. From being on _this_ side of it, absorbing the memories and revelation as an adult.

"Tell me how I should be able to do it," he said to Evi. "Tell me how _you_ do it."

"Honey, it either happens or it doesn't." Somehow her eyebrow lift made that very clearly a virility pun. She lifted her hand, waggling her fingers. "Just focus real hard on the surface of your skin you want to touch with. Put your energy _there_. It's spread out, and you don't have so much of it, so you need to make sure it's concentrated." She strutted the few steps over to Vince and reached up on her tip-toes to flick him on the forehead.

Vince smacked himself in the face trying to catch whatever he thought he'd felt and made a noise like Homer Simpson. Nathan snorted, amused despite his frustration.

Evi walked back slower, her face more thoughtful, her eyes a little sad as she looked him up and down. "So I'm _hoping_ you're not permanently dead when I ask this question, but... you keeping my boy happy? You and Blondie?"

"Me and Audrey," Nathan corrected. He twisted his facsimile of a mouth into what he hoped was a dry but reassuring smile. Duke was... complicated. So was _happy,_ while the Troubles were around. Duke's own Trouble was a doozy, on that front. Nathan still remembered with bitter vividness the night he'd almost walked out, too afraid of what Duke _was_ , of what that could mean for them. They still hadn't finished dealing with that. Nathan didn't know if they ever would. He wondered what Evi would think of Duke's kind of 'special', the truth of what the Reverend's hints and promises had turned out to be. But he answered, "He's doing all right. Took a while to get over you dying."

"...Yeah." She spread her hands. "Didn't we all?"

Something occurred to him. "Audrey shot the Rev. He isn't...?"

Her eyes gleamed a bit evilly, but she shook her head. "That old goat? Moved on... Maybe to Heaven, but if there's any justice, then the other place."

Nathan kept silent, since he didn't believe in either.

"I did hear about it, though," Evi added. 

"On the... ghost vine?"

"Very funny. No-one _ever_ thought of that before... It's no wonder Duke likes you. You're about as straight a straight man as he could ask for."

Nathan shook himself, and pointed to the computer. "We should... get back to work." He looked guiltily at the other half of the room. Five out of seven hands were raised and they had an audience again. 

They found the news report pretty quickly, though, in the end. The reason they found it so quickly... was because they hadn't needed to go back to the old archives, after all.

"This happened _last year_ ," Nathan said. "Same time last October. I don't remember this."

"Yeah," snarked Evi, "but I've learned that memory in Haven is a funny thing."

"Hey, I _know_ about the Troubles, okay?" Nathan retorted. "I know now and I knew back then. I maybe didn't _want_ to know, or to accept that I had one -- hell, it presented like a goddamn medical condition, you can't blame me for going to the doctors first -- but I knew about them. Are you suggesting _I_ blocked this out, too?" He looked down, spreading his insubstantial arms, wafting them through the desk top. 

Evi shrugged. "I guess dumbass denial can blank through a lot. Maybe you figured you dreamed it. Maybe it wasn't this widespread last time. Hell, I don't know. _You're_ the one who knows about this. I'm just dead."

"The article." Nathan swung back to it, annoyed. "' _Groups of attendees at a High School movie special and others became far too invested in their costumes. Suspicions are high that a batch of contaminated wine on special offer in a local store holds the blame_...' Is that better or worse than 'gas leak'?"

Evi kept scouring the page. "Other news this edition included three suspicious deaths. Homeless man, knife attack, and one who... 'may have been trampled by speeding cattle'? This is normal in Haven?"

"That's not normal even in Haven," Nathan growled. He clicked on the related articles. With the possible exception of the homeless man, they were obvious cover-ups, but he was willing to bet on the cause of all three. "Three in one day... People died from this, last time. And last time was smaller." He watched her roll her eyes at him, but ignored her and thought fast. "But last time, we _didn't_ have Audrey. She's immune. This Trouble would have run its course unchecked. Maybe there's still a chance this ends without a body count." Except going by what he'd seen of this Trouble's choices here, that homeless man had probably been made a ghost, like all of them. Had he... not found his way back to his body, afterward?

If that was a danger, then it was important, he decided, to keep people's spirits up... no pun intended, but on the other hand: "If lots of people became... insubstantial like this, before, then they _got back_ at the end of it." He looked around his little flock. "A few people died, but there's no mention of mass mysterious deaths. You're all going to be all right. Even if we _can't_ find a way to fix this, if _Audrey_ doesn't fix this, last year it seems like everything went back to normal without her anyway, eventually, and most everyone involved came through it unscathed."

"Whoo! Bravo pep talk!" Evi said. "Okay, we know this. We have the high school movie night. Put the ad side-by-side with this year's..." She held up the current _Haven Herald_. "It seems a pretty sure thing. But what the hell do you hope to do about it, Mr Intangible?"

"I--" Nathan looked at her. He still had not managed to assert his presence on the world in any meaningful way. He had a sinking feeling, but he tried: " _You're_ the one who can touch things. Make yourself felt. Heard, too, I'll bet--" He didn't know the rules, but that expression looked like confirmation. "Duke is in danger from this, too."

"Play the _cheap_ card," she sneered. "Hey! I am not some Troubles-fixing Scoobie-Doo Mystery Machine happy camper, and this shit _killed_ me already. I don't help, except... oh wait, yeah, that's it -- _myself_. Me, and _mine_. And guess what? Since I'm dead and he's sleeping with two other people, I'm not too sure that includes Duke."

"If you thought that, then why involve yourself in any of this?" Nathan asked impatiently. He would've carried on, but Max Hansen chose that moment to reassert himself upon the scene _and then some_.

He'd been, if Nathan thought about it, more solid and _real_ than any of the rest of them before, even including Evi. It maybe contributed to the daunting impression of him, but then again, maybe that was his bearing and the sense of threat he seemed to emit... or maybe that was just Nathan.

He saw how the whole room's faces had frozen in shock as Max reappeared, marching through the wall straight into the midst of them. It _wasn't_ just Nathan. But Max... something had happened to him. Max _now_ was exuding energy like a light bulb; brighter, more solid, more _real_ than ever. Vince Teagues gave a growl and lunged toward Max, intercepting -- or for a moment at least seeming to intercept his ghostly charge. Max laughed as he strode through Vince. He whipped a hand through the air, causing a newspaper from the table to fly up and wrap itself around Vince's cross ogre face.

"Come back for mine," Max said, grinning like a cheerful skull: still terrifying, for all that the grin was genuine.

" _No_ ," said Nathan, drawing his gun. He fumbled it as the kaleidoscope of memory was dredged up, as before, at the sight of Max approaching fast and angry. Like some internal switch had been struck, Nathan's thoughts scattered. His hand shook even though he'd kept hold of the gun. Evi hurled herself at Max, hands pushing forward into his chest to shove and block, trying to give Nathan time to steady and aim, but Max just slammed her aside. She fell through a wall, disappearing from sight. Nathan mustered words-- "Don't you want to be _better_ than this?" They shivered on his tongue as though his tongue was still flesh.

They weren't bad words, in the circumstances. Maybe they'd have worked on _someone_. But not on Max. He slapped the gun out of Nathan's hand.

Nathan backed off, through a table, through Dave. "Nathan! What do we do?" Annalise cried out.

"He must have leeched from a whole _lot_ of the new spooks for this much juice!" Evi was back, but keeping her distance.

"I thought he could only do it to family?" Nathan said.

"It takes a deep connection to some emotion for that sort of deep hold. He can still steal a little from a lot!"

"Tell us how to help, Wuornos!" Baylen called.

"Stay away from him," Evi responded. "You'll make him stronger."

Running away, it was occurring to Nathan, might be the best thing he could do to protect the rest of them. He backed off again, preparing to turn and run, reminding himself that the wall wasn't a barrier. But Max was faster than he was ready to counter. Max caught him and dragged him around. He thrust his hand into Nathan's chest.

Nathan froze, arms caught in the motion of flying out to defend himself. He looked down. It wasn't deep, but Max's palm and fingers definitely blurred and crossed the boundaries of his own substance, settled inside his chest. It didn't _hurt_ , but it didn't exactly _not-feel_ , the way that Nathan was accustomed to not-feeling, either.

This could not be good. Nathan tried to make himself move, to shove Max away.

"Block him!" yelled Evi. "Think of something he can't get past, that he has _no_ hooks into! You've a whole damn life that had nothing to do with him! Think of Duke! He's strong enough to reduce you to _threads_ , you have to _block him now!_ " 

Her words didn't exactly take the pressure off. Nathan had already known he needed to stop this, after all. He clutched for Max's arm, trying to drag it from him. Instead, his hands sank in, becoming absorbed, picking up the same strange glow that had started at the contact between Max's hand and his chest. All he'd done was further extend the link between them that was feeding Max.

In the absence of any other move, he frantically re-evaluated Evi's words. He thought of Duke, and Audrey, and his life now, which was full of Troubles... his own and everyone else's... but was still happier for the most part than he'd dreamed he could be while his own Trouble was still in force. Any connection _Max_ had to his life was buried far in the past. Why should Max have any hold over him now?

The flare of light slowly dimmed in the contact between them as the seepage of his energy slowed and stopped. Max snarled, increasing his efforts and agitation, but whatever he was trying didn't achieve the effect he wanted, and the more he failed, the more hope Nathan stole back. 

" _Duke_ ," he hissed, growing bolder, leaning forward. He remembered Max's reaction of revulsion, earlier. "Practically live together, these days. How do you feel about having that in your genes? Just think, on a regular basis, Duke Crocker fucks your flesh and blood." His teeth grit, he drew the poison out. Max had been in prison twenty-five years, and Nathan knew what such a thing meant there. Duke, much more a New Man, a man of the world, or whatever else he chose to glibly call himself, had laughed at Nathan's struggle to accept and adapt to being involved with someone of his own sex, even if that relationship also included a woman. It had been a learning curve for Nathan. But he'd learned it, and he'd take it, now, as a weapon against Max.

He didn't know what he was doing... He didn't expect to be doing it... but suddenly those points of connection between them flared bright again and the energy started to draw the other way. He could feel his own power returning to him, burgeoning and bolstering. Then, he felt the _rest_ of what Max had stolen start to flow into him.

"You go, kid!" Evi yelled, her voice croaking, and edged with a hint of disbelief. "Drain him dry!"

But Nathan didn't want that.

Max's own individual energy had a distinct flavour. Somehow, Nathan could tell when they were down to that and it was no longer the stolen power he was taking back. He broke desperately free of the contact, gasping. The world looked... _different_ , coming out the other side.

He couldn't really have reconciled himself to the thought of having seriously damaged Max, who was still his own kin -- of doing it _that_ way, so intimate and despicable, even if no such concern seemed to be carried by Max himself. 

Besides, he didn't want anything that came from Max. Even his raw energy seemed to feel wrong.

"You goddamn--" Max was staggering too, reeling, far more transparent than he'd been when Nathan first encountered him, less _real_ , now, than the other temporary ghosts. "You perverted pipsqueak of a--"

" _Go away_ ," Nathan rasped. "I left you _enough_. But _I_ don't know what the hell I'm doing, and if you don't go away _now_ , I _will_ take more."

The moment held, face to face, glaring, their roles reversed. Then Max swung his arm hard through a chair -- failing to connect with it -- and blind fury crossed his face, twisting it into an ugly expression, before he turned his back and stalked away.

" _You ain't got me beat!"_ Nathan heard his parting yell. "You solve this, go ahead, boy. Put your ass back at that Police Chief's desk! I'll still be there, lurking in the shadows. And _you'll still be weak!"_

Nathan took what seemed a hell of a lot like a shuddering breath and gathered himself up, trying to regain composure.

"I knew you could do it, Chief," Annalise said.

If she had, she'd been on her own. Evi's gaze held surprise and acrobatic eyebrows. Nathan looked around the rest of them.

"The kid--" They stared blankly. "The High School kid. The one that organises the movies. His details weren't in the papers, but the Teagues must have spoken to him recently, for the poster to be there on the back page. We need to search their desks, their diaries--"

The way they stared at him now was weird. Nathan knew he was, well, exuding. Overflowing. Far too much energy packed inside him, and unlike Max, he didn't know how to keep a tight hold on it. He could feel it leaking away by the second. Max had been scary with it. He didn't want to know what he was like with it. But he hoped the energies that peeled away went back to those Max had stolen them from, somehow. He couldn't hope to control and direct them. He turned around and made for the nearest desk -- Dave's.

Dave was behind him. His little goblin form stared and skittered back as Nathan rounded on him. "I-is that you, Nathan? What the hell you doing _dead_? Garland would have our heads!"

Vince had removed the newspaper from his face and was staring too.

Nathan was _visible_? He leaned in to Dave, not really able to resist, and intoned a deadpan, " _Boo_." 

Dave shook his head and blinked rapidly, but maybe because he was a monster, didn't really react in a truly spectacular fashion. 

Nathan _had_ to get Duke before he was back to normal.

Right now... He walked around Dave and, focusing on his fingers as Evi had told him, shoved the back of the chair at Dave's desk away to clear his path.

It screeched on its castors right the way across the room and slammed into the wall with an almighty _bang_.

Everyone jumped. "Careful, Hero Type," Evi said. "I hear office furniture can be dangerous when riled."

After that, post-it notes, diaries, scrap paper and the backs of flyer leaflets were easy. Nathan found what he needed on a post-it -- "' _Marcus Johnson. High school movies. Lousy selection, but topical. 5 The Av. Pick up posters. ?Interview ?feel-good piece_.'"

Nathan straightened. he had what he needed. Now, he could go _act_ upon it while he still had the extra power to spare. The longer this Trouble was active, the more very real danger there was of people being hurt by it. He looked back at Evi, and over the group of ghosts behind her. "Keep them safe for me just a while longer."

She opened her mouth, eyes flashing, sarcastic tongue ready... and at the last, for whatever reason, decided against it. "Well, fine. You owe me, Wuornos."

Which raised an unfortunate question, for she _had_ helped him, even putting herself between him and Max, and how could he ever pay her back for that? He realised, abruptly, that when this Trouble was over, unlike the rest of them, Evi would not be returning miraculously to life.

She seemed to pick up his thoughts as he hesitated. Her eyebrows sketched out shapes of irony. "There's a hollow under the tree out on Main Street... Quality rum works best, to appease the Ghost of Evi Crocker. _And_... you don't tell Duke about this. _Ever_."

"Why...?" Nathan started to blurt the question before he realised how much, of course, it would wound Duke to discover Evi hadn't moved on. "Still looking after that guy?" he asked, instead.

"Just go," she said, and turned aside. "Save the day."

" _Thank you_ ," said Nathan, with as much emphasis as he could, unable to think of anything more profound. He cast his eyes over the rest of them. "You'll be back in your bodies soon."

He stepped out through the wall. The Avenue wasn't close. He started to run.

***

Horror wasn't something Audrey entirely felt she _grasped_ , though you'd think she was an aficionado going by Nathan's bitching on the subject. Oh, you could give her some teenage vampire angst, a few homoerotic werewolves, some hot guys fighting monsters, some spooky chills and thrills. But zombies were kind of _depressing,_ the appeal of slasher movies eluded her (inevitably the psychology of it all failed to add up, and the whole thing fell down under a general unscary feeling of fakeness) and she wasn't afraid of ghosts. Really, she had never understood the impulse that compelled kids in particular to watch horror movies so avidly. To fixate on a genre that was about disturbing the hell out of the viewer. She bantered with Duke about it on the way to the kid's address, hoping to distract him from the increasing twitchiness she was reading as _hunger_.

"It's the dare element," Duke said, "and teenagers are assholes. But I still dig Romero. Did you really read _all of_ Anne Rice?"

They crept inside the home, armed with tasers, and the conversation silenced. The bite wounds in Audrey's wrist ached dully. She had begun to watch behind her for Duke again, not quite able to trust where he was or what he'd do next, however much she wanted to.

Duke at her back was usually a welcome presence, never a cause for concern. But aside from the vampire issue, he did tend to reveal how much he wasn't a cop. After a minute, he carried on the conversation, hissing under his breath, "Some teenagers think the most dumb-assed, creepy shit is cool. No sense of reality. I swear there's an age somewhere between 13 and 17 where _everyone's_ a psycho."

Audrey, who was pretty sure she'd heard profilers offer the same argument, hand signalled to shush him. She watched him start to open his mouth again, and then swallow his disappointment. How much was this need to talk an indicator of the struggle against his need for her blood becoming critical?

The house they were in was very ordinary, although Duke's mimes about the tidy doilies tucked under most of the ornaments in the downstairs rooms seemed to indicate that he considered them as much objects of terror as all the monsters.

A male zombie was moving slowly about the living room, no longer watching a TV left on in one corner, and a female one was in the kitchen. The zombies were relatively easy to dodge and then contain, shutting and wedging the doors of those rooms to keep them in.

"Must be the kid's parents," Duke said, hushed. "I guess we know what he thinks of them." He cleared his throat and said, with a careful amount of neutrality, "If this kid is still human, can I bite _him_? I figure that would, you know, give him a pretty good incentive to want to turn everyone back."

"You just keep a hold on things, Duke," Audrey said. "I know you can." She cast her eye at the stairs. There was music pounding faintly now from one of the upper rooms. She did not think it had been there when they entered the house. With a little luck, their Troubled person was the source of the noise, and they would resolve this quickly. She stopped and frowned at Duke, though. There was something important to do first. "Let me see what that wound looks like now."

He lifted his shirt. The star shape on his abdomen was pink and less angry than earlier, but the thought of him returning to human with it like that still made her uneasy. The memory of the gaping hole it had been before she'd given him her blood kept returning to her.

"Wait here," she said, and nipped back into the small kitchen. She evaded the mom-zombie in there -- maybe Duke had a point: the apron was almost as terrifying as the doilies -- and grabbed a knife from a rack and a clean cup from the drainer, and also another pack of candy bars that she spied on the counter top. She supposed it was too much to hope that the blood loss would counter the extra intake of calories. "Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson." She ducked under the zombie's arms and made it out of the door, then wedged the chair back to seal it in.

"...Audrey?" Duke checked her, concern straining his voice, as she held up the knife. She rested the cup on the top of a bookcase, hovering her wrist over it. "What are you doing? Audrey, no. You're pale as hell. You can't do this again, right when we have to face this Troubled kid and things could get dangerous. You _need_ that!"

He moved to stop her, but she'd already drawn another nick with the tip of the knife. The one from earlier was clotted and unwilling to be reopened -- the healing powers of vampire-spit. Some of the literature she'd read had made a point of mentioning that. The ones whose authors had bothered to think about the consequences of teeth-sized punctures in major arteries.

"Keep back," she warned Duke. She didn't _fill_ the cup -- he was right, she needed it as well. But it had a good few inches in the bottom before she stopped. "Um... lick?" She offered out the palm of her other hand awkwardly. "No biting and you get the cup after."

Duke was visibly salivating and had drool to spare. She clapped her wet hand over the new cut, holding it down hard, and stood back so that Duke could take the cup.

The slurping was pretty gross, but maybe that was an unavoidable consequence of the protruding fangs. It was kind of disturbing that when he finished the cup, he wiped his fingers around the inside of it where his tongue couldn't reach and licked those off, too. But the more the better, she reminded herself, in terms of healing that injury, and _clearly_ he was desperate -- and what kind of resistance had he been putting in all this time to leave her alone, if she was witnessing the want he'd been fighting down, exposed and naked, now?

It was a cruel Trouble that transformed someone you loved into a tasty meal.

Audrey grimaced, watched him _clack_ the cup back down on the bookcase and avert his face from her, shoulders slumping, ashamed of his need. "How is it?" she asked, pointing at the loose ends of his shirt. Her head was spinning slowly and she knew she couldn't do this again. 

"Better," Duke said, indistinct. his face was still lowered as he turned enough to pull up his shirt again. 

Maybe the pink was a _little_ bit paler, but honestly it didn't look much different to Audrey. Maybe that hadn't been enough for any real effect. At least it seemed to have abated Duke's hunger. 

"If this guy is human," Audrey said, deciding, picking up the knife and cup again, sliding the knife into her pocket and hooking the cup handle around a zip tie on her jacket, "then he's donating. I am _not_ solving this Trouble just to see you collapse dead."

Duke stared at her for a long moment, then down at the wound, fingers brushing over the pink edges of it. "Okay," he said slowly. "I am not going to argue with that."

Duke was still a pragmatist at heart.

"Okay," Audrey echoed back. At this point, she was _hoping_ the kid was human. She did not want to take the chance. Although she winced at the thought of what Duke might think about drinking blood once he was... no longer under the influence. "Let's do this."

She found her hand wanting to reach for her gun as they crept up the stairs, so she gave in to the temptation. She had been trying not to shoot the creatures, but they didn't know what they were up against with the kid.

Along the staircase past two clashing types of horrible wallpaper was a darkened, windowless upstairs corridor at the centre of the house. The music emerged, louder now, from an ajar door along the hallway. It had been coming in stops and starts, and as they drew within a few feet of the door, it abruptly stopped again.

Audrey internally cursed, but there was no point in hiding. Her footfall had landed audibly just outside the music's cut, made louder by the shock of the silence. She kept going and pushed open the door. 

A kid waiting in a computer chair on castors swivelled around to face her -- and it _was_ a kid, about three layers of teenage acne fighting for dominance over the lower half of his face. He looked human. It was very disconcerting. Audrey remembered, nastily, the last time she had taunted a high school student into blowing himself up.

"Whoa!" the kid said, "Even down to the plucky girl hero, this time. It's even better than I thought." And he picked up a video camera and pointed it at her, then at Duke, who was entering the room behind her, looking nonplussed.

The kid also reached behind himself and slapped his finger on a key to start the music blaring out again.

"I _hate_ the ones who do it on purpose," Duke said loudly. "Hate them, _hate_ them. Point that camera away, unless the next thing you want to film is _me killing you_." Duke's eyes flickered down to the camera. "You want to tell me about the _great_ reason you'd better have for doing this, kid?"

Because sitting playing with computer equipment and what looked like his own amateur damn studio while the world went to hell around him didn't seem like recalcitrant or sorry behaviour.

"Art, man! the kid retorted, flinging up his arms. "I've been out all day collecting footage. I had to come back to upload before I could get more. How else do you make a monster movie with no budget? Move to this freaky town, dude, and _make your own monster!"_ As his movements grew animated and his eyes shone with fervour, Audrey became pretty sure no-one had had to 'make' this kid into a monster.

On his multiple monitor screens buried in the set up of computer, DVD and camera equipment, Audrey could see flickering images play out. A group of one type of vampires fought another: the traditional type were trouncing the Twilight clones. She watched, in the footage, as one woman ripped half a man's throat out, and Audrey's heart sank as she let go of the idea that this could be resolved before anyone died for real.

The kid _crowed_ at the image.

Elsewhere, a man transformed into a wolf and pounded away up the street, howling at the fakey, overlarge full moon in the Troubled sky. A witch stripped nude in the moonlight, giving the camera a lengthy pause. The monitor where the vampires fought flickered with static. Sounds on the recording made it through the music: cursing and a quick retreat.

In the new image that replaced it, Max Hansen strode down the centre of the street with both fists clenched at the end of his swinging arms. Audrey recognised him even with his form colourless and bathed oddly in light, and gasped. 

"There are ghosts from this Trouble?" Duke asked, an edge to his voice. It was a particularly odd note, even though he didn't seem to have any recognition in his face for Max.

Johnson gave a derisive snort. "Oh, sure, but most of them are a complete waste of time. You can't even _see_ them, or if you can they're like wisps. They barely show up on camera. Useless! I can't film that. But this guy, _this guy_ is _great_... He walked through a few walls and I lost him, though." Mawkish teenage disappointment filled his voice. "After my memory's clear I'll go out and try to find him again."

"That's Max Hansen," Audrey said flatly, and watched recognition flare in Duke. "Marcus, that man's already dead. I was at his autopsy. He's not someone from the town transformed by your Trouble."

"That's a _real_ ghost?!" the kid whooped. "Provable? On camera? _Score!_ "

"Max Hansen..." Duke spoke with a dull, apprehensive note. Audrey wasn't sure what connections he was making that she wasn't, but he clearly had something. "Audrey, that guy was supposed to be Nathan's father, and he's out there, and -- well, it sure as hell looks like something about this Trouble has got him stirred up. Audrey, Nathan _died_."

It took her a moment to put it together, her thoughts full of Marcus Johnson and his screens. To an extent there was no sense speculating about Nathan out there, potentially at the mercy of Max -- who'd disappeared off the screen and been replaced by more werewolf antics -- should the two of them cross paths. Max wouldn't want to hurt Nathan, would he? They were family, after all. Max had been looking for him out of some kind of sense of connection. Still, that was a meeting that would surely screw with Nathan's head.

The rest worried her more. She turned on Johnson. "Tell me that the ghosts turn _back_."

The kid shrugged, too wrapped in his ego to notice her urgency or gathering ire. "Most of 'em, but what's the point? They're all useless people anyway, might as well be dead already. That's the only reason they change that way." He was laughing as he said the last.

"Shut the fuck up," Duke snarled, taking a step forward. Audrey moved to hold him back, but noticed his eyes had turned red and stopped before she physically touched him, hissing warningly instead. "You don't know _anything_."

"The losers and the lifeless," Johnson sneered. "Even worse that the parasitic users, leeches and junkies that get to be _vampires_ , but at least I can _film those_."

A tremble ran through Duke's form. Audrey remembered that was an old wound, one that Nathan saved up and only used when he was really mad. 

"It's not you," she said quickly. "It latched onto your Trouble. We figured that out." To Johnson she asked sharply, "And what about your parents? Did you film them, too? Anything to say about what they turned into? Or does what they turned into say more about _you_?"

For the first time, the kid's face looked conflicted. Then he shook himself out of it. "They'll be just fine when it wears off. I locked the doors."

Audrey had picked the lock on the front door to let herself in, but since they'd sealed the parent-zombies in separate rooms, she supposed that still stood. " _Considerate_ of you," she sneered, pushing for an emotional reaction out of the kid. Anger, defensiveness, preferably _regret_. If this Trouble was fuelled by his passion to make his monster movies, maybe he was more blinkered than truly evil.

"Well, yeah," the kid retorted, though. "It's dangerous out there. I can see how even your tame vampire considers you a tasty snack." He nodded at the crusted wounds on Audrey's wrist and snickered. 

"He--" Duke's hands were twitching. 

" _Not you_ ," Audrey assured him, and turned back to Johnson, trying to quash her anger. "He was _hurt._ I gave him this myself, freely. _Look_ at your footage, Marcus. Really look at it. Your Trouble is killing people. Some of them aren't going to be able to get up again after this, with just a few confused, nightmarish memories to take away."

Johnson shrugged. "They say stuff about art and suffering."

"That's supposed to be the _artist's_ suffering, you little shit," Duke said. "Not everyone around him."

Audrey was about at the end of her tether. The kid could have killed Nathan. Might have killed Duke. He could have killed an untold number of others; one for certain. He didn't _care_. He only turned back to click a button on his computers, switching between footage that had gone fuzzy and grey on one monitor, rearranging wires and starting up another stream of images. "We need you to stop this," Audrey said, hardening her voice. "Marcus, you need to stop this _now_."

"No!" He flung his hands up, swinging around on his chair. "Are you crazy? I only get one chance each year! Last year I didn't get enough to work with. I need to go out and get more film!"

"You--" Duke was incredulous. "This is _not okay_ , kid!"

Audrey said, "This isn't detention from your teacher, or a slap on the wrist from your parents. This is murder, Marcus, if you know people are dying and allow it to continue. This is _jail_. And I will make sure that _jail_ happens."

"Bitch, how?" the kid returned hotly. "You're gonna come out and say, 'You changed the whole town into monsters' and use that to prosecute a sixteen year old, lock him up and throw away the key? I don't think so! I'll just finish making my movie, and everything will be _just fine_. Hardly anyone died last time, and I _did_ check after -- those people were a waste of space anyway."

"Marcus!" Audrey snapped. He was turning away from her, absorbed in screens and moving pictures, no attention for anything else. Her patience expired. She drew her gun again and put four bullets into his recording equipment without a pause. The kid gave a great wailing cry of rage and loss. "People's _lives_ are at stake! This is important!" But breaking his focus on the gear and rendering his movies impossible didn't snap Marcus Johnson out of his obsession. 

It just made him incoherent with rage. 

His face was red with anger and eyes tear-splotched as he turned around. He rose from his chair... but _kept_ rising, impossibly, until his head pressed the ceiling, and the colour of his face had distorted to an unreal shade of dark red. His clothes burst and muscles and body rippled. His hands grew claws. Horns pierced the ceiling, scattering plaster down as he shook his head.

Of _course_ he wasn't human. Of course. Duke would have been all over him since the moment they'd walked in if he hadn't subconsciously smelled of _something else_.

Now, Duke looked alarmed and their Troubled person was some kind of... of movie demon or devil, and how were they supposed to fight _that_?

Audrey cursed herself for wasting so many bullets on his equipment -- all in all, it really hadn't been the best of her ideas -- as she raised the gun again and expended the rest of the clip. The demon reached for her. Bullets glanced off its hide. Equipment sparked again as a rebound struck electrics, and Audrey felt something sting her cheek. "Damn it! -- Duke, _no!"_

He'd expended the ammo in his shotgun seconds after her, and as she frantically tried to reload, not letting her concerns affect the instinctual, trained-in motions, she watched with horror as he put himself between her and the demon. He got his hands up and managed to catch most of the oncoming hand without getting scored by its claws, though his feet scraped on the floor as its greater strength pushed him back.

_Eyes_ , Audrey thought, desperately rethinking and setting her aim anew. _If I can't shoot through the skin, then the eyes..._ It was a small target and she wished she'd reloaded Duke's abandoned shotgun, instead. It was easy to forget that this was a teenage boy she was firing on as she pulled the trigger again and again.

Duke grunted in pain as the claws moved, sinking into his defensively raised arms. The unexpected bonus of the demon transformation was that Johnson's form simply didn't have the space to manoeuvre, but it was still horrifying to witness how proportionally larger the demon figure was than Duke. It make Duke look tiny, poised and braced in her defence.

The demon raised its other hand to fend off her bullets, but she'd about given up any confidence of finding a soft target, between height and angle, constant movement and armour.

She had to do _something_. This was barely holding Johnson -- the creature Johnson had become -- and stalling wasn't enough, they had to _stop_ him. What could she-- _electricity_ , she thought suddenly. The wreckage of the kid's equipment was still sparking, connected to the mains. But how to get it into the monster? Maybe Duke could be a conduit? His body was technically dead right now, his heart not beating anyway, but that wasn't to say the damage wouldn't return with him when he changed back to human. Audrey tried to remember what damage was done to the body by electric shock -- by a lightning strike? -- but couldn't. Could she lose Duke when she might have already lost Nathan? Could she ask it of him?

There were more lives at stake than theirs. Johnson would inflict worse and non-survivable damage on Duke, in any case, if he continued unchecked.

"Du--" She opened her mouth to gasp out his name, to outline the plan, and Nathan burst through the wall. "... _Nathan?"_

He skidded to a halt, apparently just as startled to see them -- and _extremely_ startled to find himself faced with a ten foot tall, four foot wide demon, squeezed into the small room. He'd emerged behind the demon's back, and was too close to stop himself before half his transparent body overlapped its hard, red, bullet-proof flesh. He gave a startled yelp and stumbled back. Audrey, just as startled by what she'd just witnessed, voiced a second, more incredulously questioning, _"Nathan?!"_

"Nate?" Duke echoed her, and gurgled as he struggled with the hand trying to crush him.

Nathan gaped at the monster, arms swinging helplessly by his sides. He looked like Max had in the recorded footage, bright energies alive in his form -- a form he'd already demonstrated was clearly insubstantial. "I -- I came looking for a kid," he stuttered, craning his head back, staring upwards as he took another step away from Marcus Johnson.

He'd diverted at least some of its attention from Duke already. The demon's head scraped around, stripping more plaster from the ceiling, and the kid's voice emitted from its lips, sullen and childish and _deeply_ strange in its new context: "Aw, _damn it_! Another ghost, and you wrecked my camera!"

"It's the kid!" Duke yelled. "It's the kid, Nathan! Do something -- ugh, I don't know, something _ghosty_!" He gave a strangled cry as Johnson finally realised he could just lift his arm and steal all of Duke's leverage in one fell swoop, leaving him dangling, both feet kicking frantically off the ground.

"I--" Nathan raised his hand, staring at it, then extended it toward the demon again, uncertainly. He pushed his fingers through the tough, red skin of the demon's back.

Johnson looked like he was about to rip Duke's head off. "Nathan, now!" Audrey yelled. It was possible he couldn't see all of Duke's predicament from where he was. She wasn't sure what he was thinking, and she certainly wasn't sure how his current state of being _worked_ , but he could get beyond that armoured hide, and there was no time for hesitation.

Determination took over Nathan's face and he stepped closer, reaching up to the limit of his height, pushing his hand deep inside the monster's chest cavity. Audrey saw the muscles in his arm tense up as he squeezed his hand closed.

"Ungh." Johnson made a weird, discomforted noise. "Urk."

Duke dropped from the demon's grasp and landed on his knees, gasping and bloody. He made a gurgling shout of alarm as he realised what was about to happen, and Audrey saw it too, diving in to grasp the back of his jacket and try to haul him out of the way before the giant demon collapsed on top of him. Audrey had the horrible feeling that they weren't going to get clear in time and she yelled in advance, bracing herself... But it was a much smaller impact that she heard behind her, and she turned to see it was the teenage body of Marcus Johnson that had face-planted the floor.

Nathan was standing behind Johnson, hand still outstretched. He lifted his eyes from the kid's unmoving body. They fixed on Duke, staring. His eyes narrowed in a perplexed squint. He opened his mouth--

And vanished.

"Nathan! _No!"_ Audrey yelled, struggling to her feet, lunging uselessly into the space that he'd occupied. Off balance, she stumbled into the wall.

"It's okay!" Duke said, spitting and sounding grossed out, his voice constricted. "He's gone back... his body's in the car, Audrey. Bleeergh. Oh, damn. Damn, that tastes _foul_... Sorry, no offence. And this..." He held his bleeding arms out. "This hurts... so much more... when I'm not a _freakin' vampire_." He scrabbled at the front of his shirt. Pulled it up to reveal a faded pink star shaped scar in his flesh. "Oh, thank God."

Audrey closed her eyes a moment and breathed a long sigh. Then she blinked them back open. "Nathan," she said. She took a step for the door and tripped over Johnson's body.

It took a moment to get past the haze of urgency chanting Nathan's name inside her head, standing there wondering _why_ she'd suddenly hesitated... until she realised anew that they had just killed a teenage boy to stop this Trouble. A _kid_ , whose parents were only downstairs and probably waking up from _their_ altered states, now. "Oh my God. Duke, phone 911!" She fell down to Johnson's side and rolled him over onto his back.

"They're gonna be busy," Duke said, but was getting up, taking his phone out anyway. Audrey checked the kid's pulse, his breathing... nothing.

__

Damn! What she didn't need from the end of this day was another round of CPR. Especially not to save the same remorseless little shit who had caused all of this chaos in the first place.

But Duke was talking on the phone, and she dutifully started chest compressions, dully wishing she could just _go home_ and not do this all over again.

***

Nathan opened his eyes and stared up at the roof of Duke's truck. His senses reeled as he tried to figure out the sequence of events that had got him there, but it seemed his body had, once again, been hauled around on adventures that he didn't remember. He hadn't been in it at the time.

He sat up, his head feeling slow even if he couldn't feel the exact status of his body right now, which as he turned his hands over and pulled at his clothes in the usual checks, at least looked fine. Temporary death had made him sluggish last time, too.

He was clumsily getting out of the car when a blur flickered across his vision. He squinted and shielded his eyes from the late afternoon sunlight, and focused on the spot where that slight blur seemed to be concentrated. It was faint enough to make him doubt for a second, almost like nothing was really there at all, like his vision was playing tricks. 

"Evi?" he asked aloud, thinking resolutely that he _could_ see something.

"So you made it back." Her voice reached his mind somehow, though he almost wasn't sure that it passed through his ears to get there. But still, he had the ghostly impression of her voice. Focusing hard, he could catch the bitterness that shaded it.

"The others?" Nathan asked groggily, concern flaring as more pieces of what he _had_ been doing, and all the uncertainties still left open, descended on him. "Are they--?"

Her faint form shrugged. As he focused upon her form and her voice, it seemed both were becoming clearer, and it was possible to make out movements and even facial expression if he squinted. "They disappeared. I'm guessing they're back -- at least, no-one stuck around to keep me company, except for Vince and Dave. Who look normal, now, by the way -- back to themselves, anyway. When I left, they were working up to a fight about the state of their office, each claiming the other must have done it."

Nathan grunted, not surprised.

"So here we are." Evi spread her hands "And you know, and I know, and -- Max is still around, somewhere, and he's going to be more pissed off now than ever. Good thing you seem to have acquired an eye for spotting ghosts. You'll have to keep a lookout for--" The end of that got lost in the din of emergency service vehicles pulling up, but Nathan got the gist. 

He nodded. "You be careful, too." Something inside him seemed to become lighter as he looked beyond Evi and saw Duke emerge from the house. He was coming out to meet the EMTs, and Nathan watched him point them where to go, noting that he'd lost the pallor and that little pair of _what-the-hell?-FANGS_ that Nathan had seen on him when he was in the house. Mysteriously, his shirt and pants were beige and blue again, no longer black, but that made the bloodstain in the centre of his shirt stand out starkly, where Nathan had failed to notice it before. Still, Duke wasn't moving like he was badly wounded. An older woman clung to his arm, but one of the EMTs took her from him and the other went into the house. 

Duke paused outside the doorway and a weary but _incandescent_ grin spread across his face as he laid eyes on Nathan, sitting on the edge of the back seat with the car door open wide. 

Nathan raised a hand in a rather static wave.

Evi's ghost, he saw, was staring at Duke with all the things Nathan imagined having just been on his own face, plus naked longing and an awful sadness.

"Can you..." Nathan stopped and swallowed. He owed her. He'd have been in big Trouble if she hadn't been around to make sense of what was happening with Max. If she hadn't _intervened._ She hadn't had to. This might not be wise, but... "If I were to let you. Use my body. To talk to Duke again. Say goodbye. Do... Whatever you need. Could you do that? Would you _want_ to do that?"

She looked at him speculatively, her mouth falling open a little way.

Nathan wondered if his face flushed as he added, "Of course, you wouldn't be able to feel anything." Maybe his offer wasn't worth much. 

Her words refuted him. "That's some offer, if you're truly willing." There was mocking doubt in her voice, but still, along with it, so much need. "If you aren't willing, it won't work anyway."

Nathan stood up and put his arms down at his sides, spread slightly open, attempting to put his will behind the offer, bracing for... whatever. Duke was coming toward them. From the way he moved, he probably thought Nathan was opening his arms ready for an embrace. It was a bit public for them, and Duke should know better. Then again, it had been a _long_ day.

"Well..." said Evi. "Here goes nothing." Her tone still had scepticism enough to tell him she did not expect it to work. That she didn't have energy enough, or Nathan wasn't willing enough... He probably shouldn't be. This was a bad idea. But after the day he'd had, after Max, after the way Evi had polarised herself against Max, the only thought that his sludge-for-brain could produce was _why not?_ Max had taken who-knew how much from him unwillingly for who-knew how long. _This_ , he could damn well choose to do.

It _felt_ strange, as she moved to overlap him. No, he still hadn't miraculously regained the power to feel... this was more like the 'sensations' he'd experienced as a ghost. He _felt_ her presence touch him, her 'weight' settling into him. He was intensely aware of her within him, brushing against parts of him that stirred with the excitation... there his anger, there his fears... his love for Audrey and Duke... A cascade of emotions with each flare. He sensed something of her in return, but it was faint like her transparent form: her reasons for hating Max so _instinctually_ , making him flinch. Her opinion of him, while not wholly negative, was a fresh perspective he could have lived without.

" _Oh_ ," she said, as she settled deep enough in him to move his body, stepping forward slowly, awkwardly, and he could sense her getting to grips with his numbness. " _I didn't realise it was like this_."

Nathan was never quite sure what other people thought it _was_ like. He couldn't respond, almost reduced to dozing in his own body, pushed down someplace hovering at the boundary of the conscious level. It was... a very _peculiar_ feeling, to be taking a back seat in his own brain.

"Okay," said Evi, and marched to Duke with determination. She fell into those open arms, carrying Nathan's body into the public embrace. She lifted her hand -- his hand -- to stroke Duke's face, and said, "Hey, babe," in his voice, in a fashion that managed to make Nathan wince even in his buried state. Then she said, " _Duke_ ," putting so much emotion into his voice that Nathan didn't think it sounded like his voice any more at all. Then she kissed Duke, thoroughly, not letting numbness get in her way.

Nathan _felt_ the moment Evi dispersed from within him. Somehow, he knew she didn't just _leave_... didn't vanish or run out of energy. Something told him for certain that it was final: she was gone.

He stumbled as she left him, as there was a moment when neither of them were fully in control of his body. Duke caught him around the waist. "Hey, now. Watch it, 'Babe'," Duke said, worried behind the jibe. "Don't knock yourself out with the force of your passion. Are... you _all right_ , Nate?" Incredulity coated the question. 

A wave of sadness struck Nathan. Evi was gone, and it... maybe it was his fault. He'd offered... but then, surely, as he thought about it, _surely_ moving on was a positive thing? Certainly there had been nothing positive in hanging around Haven for eternity, insubstantial and incomplete, the way Max was.

He caught a hiss of pain from Duke as he shifted to better catch his balance. "What?" Nathan asked with instant suspicion. He transferred his hands to Duke's hips, where at least his clothes were undamaged. "What did you do to yourself?"

Silly question. He had seen that demon creature's claws digging into Duke's arms. There were cuts beneath his shredded jacket. The only reason there was so little blood visible was because he was wearing so many layers.

"The EMTs--" Nathan began.

"They've enough on their minds. Besides, I don't think there's anything here that needs a hospital," Duke said. The statement held the sort of tension Nathan knew well, of not wanting to go wait around endlessly in that environment when all he really wanted in the world was to go home and crash. Besides, right now the hospital was about to get very busy. So unless Duke's injuries were serious, he probably was much better off having them dealt with at home.

Nathan grunted affirmation. He was no-one to take a stand, and he wasn't going to make Duke go. Audrey still might.

"Are you okay?" Duke asked him, again. 

"I've had a strange day," Nathan said. 

And there was Audrey, walking out of the front door of the Johnson house, behind a stretcher carried between two EMTs, looking exhausted with her hair bedraggled. Nathan's breath caught as the meaning of the stretcher struck him -- that the Johnson kid had a breathing mask on and was being carried out as a living patient. He had not killed him. Another tension inside him relaxed, and he looked back to Audrey, where his gaze would much rather go.

Audrey's face was animated by new energy as she laid eyes on Nathan. She actually ran from the steps to them both and hurled herself at him. Nathan felt her arms wrap around him, curling up under his shirt and sliding into his waistband to touch skin to skin, felt her soft hair under his chin... Warmth seeped into him. It made him feel _alive_ again. 

No secret why this Trouble had chosen to strike him in the way it had. But that was its opinion, and Nathan didn't rate it. He reached out and caught Duke's hand, drawing him closer, feeling nothing... at least with the skin of his numb fingers.

"Nathan, goddamn it," Audrey gasped, and pulled back enough to glare at him in mock severity and real anguish. "I saw you _die_. Again. You are _both_ making this far too much a habit." She stepped back and reached an arm out to pull Duke in, as well, then squashed them together in her embrace.

Nathan could have said something about the need for discretion and avoiding three-way public embraces, but... opted not to. Just this once.

Finally, Audrey pulled back from them both. Duke scuffed a hand fondly through her hair. Nathan realised there was also blood on Audrey's shoulder, as well as her wrist, when he found smears on the palm of his hand and looked for the source. "We need to get you both back home and see to this," he said. He sighed and looked down. "Or... you need to go home and see to each other." He would have to go to the police station and organise arrangements to deal with the aftermath. He didn't know when he was going to get away from it all to join them. But he was uninjured, and there was no excuse for crying off the role he'd accepted, for all that he inwardly cursed it again. "I'll join you when I can."

"Nathan," Audrey said, rubbing her hand up into the gap at the collar of his shirt. He breathed in and closed his eyes, luxuriating in the feel of his skin, his heartbeat, stirring to life beneath her hand. "We'll be all right. What... back there, what did you _do_? How did you do it?" Her eyes searched his. "What the hell happened to you today?"

"I-- spent a lot of time running around town gathering up other ghosts," Nathan said, truthfully. "We searched the _Herald_ , and found out about the monster movie night. Vince had Marcus Johnson's address." He frowned, embarrassed about what had happened once he'd got on the scene, here. "I -- I thought I could draw out Johnson's energy, the way I did, um, Max's. But it wasn't working. Then I realised I could just... make that hand a little more solid and squeeze my fingers to stop his heart. The kid, he's going to live?"

"He's breathing and they got his heartbeat back," Audrey said. "But I'm honestly hoping for future health complications. He's killed _at least_ one person and didn't care. Probably a lot more than that."

"Three last time, too," Nathan added soberly.

"Little shit," Duke offered, wrapping his arms, _carefully_ , once more around the two of them. He reluctantly untangled from Nathan, as Nathan gave him a grim little nod behind Audrey's back. She was fading, her face starting to take on the sleepy slackness of adrenaline crash. "Come on..." Duke's arms wrapped her shoulders, and the sensation lighting Nathan's skin disappeared as she let him go. "Nathan can handle it from here. Let's go home."

***

Duke had to resist the urge to keep feeling in his mouth for fangs. Couldn't get used to the thought of having had them, couldn't get used to the thought of being without them. He felt like he was going to be tasting Audrey's blood for weeks... and remembering, unwelcomely, how _good_ it had tasted. 

He'd returned Audrey and himself to Nathan's house. Their things were spread among all three of their abodes, by now, but at Nathan's the most sparsely. But it was for that reason Nathan's ordinary house felt a bit like a sanctuary, sometimes. It was a place they _didn't_ go, that hadn't been marred by the strain of Troubles, only nosy neighbours. Even if it _was_ very, very dull. Most of Nathan's personality was tidily tucked away rather than adorning the decor, but that was kind of Nathan all over.

Duke and Audrey showered and tiredly helped each other clean up. She was inhaling a coffee even while she was under the hot spray of the water, and started to brighten up at least enough for coherent conversation. She'd been subdued and quiet in the car.

_Blood loss_ , Duke thought. _I took too much._ He couldn't help but conclude that most of her lassitude was down to him.

She turned her damp head to look up at him, and she must have caught the guilt on his face, because she said fiercely, "I wanted you to do it. Hell, the second time I did it myself and shoved the cup into your hand. I couldn't have lived with the idea that I could have saved you, and didn't. Besides, half of this isn't the blood, it's two lousy stints of CPR in one day." She rubbed her hands down his naked chest, cleaning off a last blood smear, ending with both palms spread over the mark where the metal pole had gone in, her fingers copying the upper points of the star. "Besides, you almost got killed defending me."

It still ached dully there, deep inside Duke's abdomen. He wondered if he was going to have to get some scans done. 

He didn't say that. 

"It looks like an old scar, now," Audrey said, with palpable relief.

Duke said, "You seem to have spent the day keeping everyone else alive. Let's get dried and get you patched up."

"I haven't washed my hair yet," she complained, "and your arms are worse than my shoulder."

"Have you _seen_ your shoulder?" Duke asked. "Presumably you're immune to anything else Troubled werewolves might carry as well as their wolfy curse, or I'd be pushing you to the Emergency Department with all the rest. The hair will wait for the morning."

"All right," she groaned. 

They just about managed to patch each other up without falling asleep on each other. Duke made use of Nathan's kitchen while Audrey flicked through the news channels and sipped at a series of heavily sugared caffeine based offerings. Maybe he couldn't make up for feeding on Audrey by feeding Audrey, but he was going to give it his best try. Nathan was going to go insane when he found out, though. Duke's stomach twitched uneasily, nothing to do with the tight feeling there from the healed wound.

He left Nathan's share of the food in the pan, and Audrey scrambled around on the sofa as he brought out the plates. They sprawled out to eat with their backs rested at opposite end, legs mingled. A vampire show came on after the news and Audrey chewed slowly, watching it, but neither of them cared much. They were practically asleep by the time it was over and they finally heard the sound of the front door as Nathan arrived home. 

Duke stood to plate some food for him, and consequently ended up caught in the crossfire of Nathan's entry and wearily enveloping embrace at the door, which he figured would almost certainly have landed on Audrey first had he not been _right there_ , because it virtually always did. Nathan kissed him almost as thoroughly as he had outside the Johnsons' house. It was getting harder to tell he couldn't feel at all. Practice made perfect, Duke supposed, dazedly, as Nathan finally let go.

"Haven's infrastructure's not _exactly_ falling apart at the seams, but it's a close thing," he said, disgruntlement dripping from his voice. "Four dead, so far. Two of them are Max's work, indirectly, I think..." He rubbed his forehead, fingers digging in hard enough to distort the skin and turn it white, anguish setting deep lines in his face.

"I noticed you come in and go straight to sweep _Duke_ off his feet," Audrey commented. _Good girl_ , Duke thought, _way to distract him from the guilt track_.

Nathan blinked, off-guard. "Well. I guess Duke kind of saved my ass today, _in absentia_."

"I saw you die," Audrey said, with a certain hint that the mock petulance was not entirely in jest. "Three times is inconsiderate, Nathan."

Nathan went to her and made up for the omission. Duke raised a hand to hide his smile under cover of a soft cough. He waited until Nathan had made amends with Audrey before asking, "Do we get to hear that story?"

Nathan's face twitched and he shook his head. "Doesn't matter now. Let's just forget about today." The way he looked at them both spoke volumes about his preferred method of forgetting. Duke went and got the plate to put in his hand before Nathan could start urging them to get frisky and miss out on dinner again.

"But you saw Max," Audrey said, sitting up and leaning forward as she watched Nathan eat, a few minutes later. "You mentioned as much earlier. That's... not nothing, Nathan."

Max's name did something to Duke's insides quite apart from his metal-signpost-stirred gut. He had the feeling, sometimes, that he remembered more about Max than Nathan did, and more about Nathan at the time when Max had been his only father. But he wiped it carefully from his expression. There was nothing from that time he wanted to bring back up, if Nathan had forgotten it. 

"What did he do?" Audrey persisted. "How did he turn into that... that _superghost_? How did _you_?"

Nathan sighed. "He was siphoning energy somehow off all the new ghosts. I... stopped him." He looked at their expressions and his forehead crinkled in irritation. Duke got enough of a look at the pity and understanding on Audrey's face to hope he hadn't been wearing anything similar. "He's _not_ my father." He scowled and checked himself, looking reluctant. "In a way, he helped me help both of you, today, but he'd sure as hell never have chosen to do it."

Duke had no idea what more there was that he _might_ have said, had he not... been Nathan. Instead, he shoved the unfinished half of his lunch away and crossed to Duke again.

He found the scar as he was pulling Duke's T-shirt over his head and froze. "What is this?" His fingers traced the star shape.

"It happened while he was a... vampire," Audrey said carefully. "But I fixed it." 

"Fixed..." 

Audrey held up her wrist. "We were really close to losing him, Nathan."

Duke had been all kinds of waiting for the penny to drop with Nathan since the moment he'd walked through the door. He felt his mouth twist, now, and he turned away, breaking loose from Nate, who he was pretty damned sure wouldn't want to be touching him in a moment anyway. Unless, quite possibly, that touch was the impact of Nathan's fist with his jaw. The end of his T-shirt was still in Nathan's hand, catching him out as he moved. Nathan stepped back, not letting go, forgotten fabric twisting in his fingers, and scrubbed his free hand through his hair. "God," he said, eyes still down, pinned on the wound.

Then he surprised Duke out of the ballpark by grabbing and kissing him again. 

"You're okay with--?" Duke gulped, unable to help himself. He had to _know_. "With me-- me--" Words failed him.

"Drinking Audrey?" Nathan rasped. " _No_. But I'm not okay with you dying, either. And the last thing I want to _worry_ about, tonight, is the three of us. You both look like you almost died today. I don't want to even think about what caused that wound." He eyed Audrey, the white bandage on her wrist. "In _either_ case."

"You _did_ die today," Duke pointed out.

"Yeah," Nathan agreed. "Let's go to bed."

"Sleep," Audrey said, a bit thickly, sounding already half there. "To _sleep_ , Nathan. Ohhh, God, _sleep_..." She groaned and rubbed the back of her neck, blinking hard.

Nate opened his mouth, then shut it again, looking disappointed.

"...Don't tell us," Duke caught up wryly. "You've been lying down all day."

***

Audrey collapsed into snoring almost while Nathan was still crouched with his head buried in her thighs, much to Nathan's nonplussed offence, moving Duke to helpless laughter. But Nathan had to accept, grudgingly, that neither of his lovers were in the condition for doing anything energetically life-affirming tonight. Duke was also practically asleep by the time they'd tucked Audrey under the covers. "You can still fuck me if you want," he grunted, burying his face in the comforter. "Just don't expect participation."

Nathan sighed and rolled his eyes. "I think I can wait until the morning, Duke."

Duke might've already been asleep by the time he finished speaking.

Nathan lay awake with his thoughts.

Should he tell Duke that Evi helped him and then moved on, when it had taken Duke so long to move on from Evi and that had almost destroyed them? When Evi had asked him _not_ to tell? It seemed to Nathan that the geography of that choice had changed when Evi _left_.

He couldn't decide. He might have to tell Duke anyway, because Baylen had been there, and even if he didn't know who she was, they'd made enough reference to Evi and Duke's relationship for him to put two and two together. 

Nathan reached out and watched the shadows of his fingers touch Duke's sleeping face in the dark. The way Evi had helped him and then gone, it left him feeling a little like he'd taken on the obligation to love Duke for both of them.

Tired and dosed up on painkillers, Duke didn't stir, even though Nathan was unable to really judge the pressure of his fingertips to ensure the lightness of his touch.

He could feel Audrey, warm and soft against his other side in the dark. Duke was a blank, but Nathan knew the warmth was there, it was only invisible. 

A shiver ran through him suddenly, and he half sat up in the bed. It seemed to him that a shadow moved in the darkness across the room -- or not quite a shadow; an ephemeral, transparent shape that carried its own faint glow, but _so_ faint it was almost not there at all. Nathan still had the undeniable feeling that it was watching him... with disapproval.

He reached under the pillow for his gun and stopped when he realised that wouldn't work now.

"Go away," he said, hearing his voice resound strongly. Max _couldn't_ touch him. Nathan wasn't going to let him.

The shadow and the sense of unwelcome company slowly faded, though the sound of his own breath seemed betrayingly loud.

Nathan couldn't do anything about the police station, but perhaps there was a subconscious reason they all so seldom came back to his place. In future, he'd steer Duke and Audrey toward exclusively using their homes, on the coastal side of town. Perhaps he would finally sell Garland's old house.

His lovers hadn't stirred, too exhausted by their wounds and the strain of the day. 

The darkness around him seemed somehow fuller, thicker than before: Nathan crouched half-up in the bed and turned his head in a watchful circuit of the room, staring into its depths for several minutes more before he lay down and tried to sleep.

END


End file.
